The Absolutely Essential Guide to Winter Park: The Village in the Heart of Central Florida

This slim paperback offers a nice, breezy introduction to Winter Park, a lovely, upscale town just north of Orlando, Florida. I found and read this book after two visits to WP. I think the book captures a lot of the town's historic character and cultural ambience.The text is informative, friendly and accurate in its descriptions of the places and things I've experienced there, such as the Park Avenue shopping district, Scenic Boat Tour, Kraft Azalea Garden and the Morse Museum's Tiffany collection. As for the many other spots I haven't yet seen, the book has piqued my interest in visiting WP again.Perhaps the best feature of this book is the way it is illustrated with colorful and character-filled old photos from antique postcards. Pioneer-era recipes are also reproduced to evoke the flavor of those earlier times.One shortcoming of this book, in my opinion, is a dearth of contemporary maps. Street maps showing points of interest would have been a welcome accompaniment to the written instructions for the walking and driving tours.As someone who rode Amtrak to and from Winter Park, I was impressed that several long distance passenger trains stop there daily, an amenity most other towns in America have lost. Though it won't bother most readers, I found it disappointing that the book doesn't mention modern rail service in WP, except to remark on the depot's appearance.Despite these quibbles, I would certainly recommend that anyone interested in a quick, useful introduction to Winter Park's past and present should seek out and read this book. For researching a trip to WP, this book, supplemented by a town map from the Chamber of Commerce or city website, would be hard to beat.