Inside Florida’s Vacation Home Capital Of The World

Although Orlando gets the airport, most of the hotel bookings, and pretty much all the glory, Kissimmee is the better base for Florida's theme parks. The Magic Kingdom is just under 11 miles away, the accommodations come with a kitchen, and Kissimmee has a lake, a Latin food trail, and a muscle car cruise that Orlando's resort strip can't match.

To put it to the test, a group of fellow travelers and I spent five nights in a nine-bedroom rental in Kissimmee's sprawling Reunion Resort. This master-planned luxury community is just six miles from Walt Disney World and has become the place to stay when visiting Central Florida's major attractions.

Not only can you easily get to popular attractions like Gatorland and the brand-new Universal Epic Universe, but it's also possible to go even further afield to places like the Space Coast without having to venture onto the perpetually busy Interstate 4 highway. That, in my book, is enough to make Kissimmee a superb alternative to Orlando.

A (Big) House in Kissimmee

Orlando's answer to a week at the theme parks is overly expensive hotel rooms but in Kissimmee, the better option is a home-away-from-home. Experience Kissimmee, Osceola County's tourism group, counts more than 30,000 vacation homes across the destination which makes little surprise, then, that it calls Kissimmee the "Vacation Home Capital of the World."

Our home for the duration of our stay was the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Epic Portal Mansion. It's managed by Jeeves by Casago, a vacation-home company whose portfolio covers the Reunion, Encore, ChampionsGate, and Solterra resorts around Kissimmee, and it didn't take long to figure out how the mansion got its name. On paper, it was aimed squarely at the kids, but not acting our age wasn't a problem.

The home's "portals" are the secret doors, slides, and crawl spaces that link one themed space to the next. This meant that the kids' bedrooms, styled after Toy Story and Star Wars, open onto an adventure room, and a working suspension bridge carried us across to the kids' zone. How do I know this? Well, despite being a group of adults, we had to try everything out for ourselves, and boy, it was fun to explore.

The kids’ zone extends over two floors, with the ground-floor space occupying what would normally be the double garage. On the upper level, two bunk rooms sleep eight between them. My favorite was the Star Wars-themed room where the bunks are built as capsules, with a built-in gaming system and even a baby Yoda.

The other is the Toy Story room with its themed beds and the arcade-style “claw machine” (complete with Martian toys) that appeared in the original movie. And yes, we had a go. Between them is a playroom with a Monsters Inc. theme where cutouts and crawl spaces lead to slides that drop into the jungle-themed adventure room below with its climbing obstacles, rope ladders, and tunnels.

Acting Like Big Kids

The nine-bedroom, nine-and-a-half-bathroom house sleeps 24, with game rooms built with grown-ups in mind as much as children: a custom laser game, a Mario Kart arcade game, a basketball hoop shoot, and in-room shooting games. Things did get competitive, too, especially over the chaotic Mario Kart.

Which raises a point worth making for anyone traveling without kids. While homes like this are marketed to families, there’s nothing saying you need kids to book one. And a house built for play works just as well for a group of adults who never entirely outgrew it. Our group had no children in it, and the kids' stuff (especially the racing arcade game) got more use than the golf simulator.

A large home theater styled after the bridge of a spaceship that reminded me of Star Trek's Enterprise, along with a pool table, foosball, and a golf simulator in the spacious upstairs lounge area. Outside is a private pool and hot tub, plenty of lounge seating overlooking the golf course, a fire pit, and a summer kitchen.

Speaking of kitchens, it's a big one. Double ovens, two oversized refrigerators, two dishwashers, and two wet bars surround the large island, which proved perfect as a food prep area for the catered breakfast we enjoyed one morning. Chef José Martinez, owner of C² Catered Events, did the honors, making fresh breakfast goodies like Eggs Benedict and waffles to order.

Kissimmee's Latin Food Trail

Our food experiences didn't end there, as we planned on sampling Kissimmee's Latin Culinary Trail. Launched in 2025, the initiative introduces visitors to the region's food scene, which is influenced heavily by the fact that more than 69 percent of the folks who live here identify as Hispanic or Latino. Puerto Ricans make up the largest chunk of them, and Kissimmee was the ideal place to sample a few new (to us) dishes.

All told, the trail features 20 restaurants, cafés, food trucks and bars serving Puerto Rican, Cuban, Costa Rican, Mexican, Dominican, and Venezuelan food. We managed three stops, and none disappointed.

Susana's Café was our breakfast spot. Set in a 100-year-old Craftsman home across from the county courthouse in historic downtown Kissimmee, we feasted on freshly made arepas, delicious griddled Venezuelan corn cakes stuffed here with scrambled eggs, cheddar, and bacon, and finished with a house garlic sauce.

We also tried tequeños, Venezuelan cheese sticks wrapped in pastry and served with guava. The coffee takes 15 minutes to arrive because it's brewed by hand in a vandola, a Costa Rican clay brewer, using beans from Oluí, a Kissimmee roaster that sources from Costa Rican farms. It was a delicious way to start the day.

Also on our list was Grillers Puerto Rico, one of three restaurants founded by chef Jose Antonio Martin Grau. The Puerto Rican-inspired menu leads with mofongo relleno, mashed fried plantain stuffed with a choice of nine fillings, and it went down a treat, especially with a Puerto Rican beer.

The third stop, El Cilantrillo, is a family-owned Puerto Rican restaurant inside the Old Town entertainment district. Its mofongo is the dish to order, with churrasco, grilled skirt steak, and fried cheese close behind. We timed our visit to coincide with the Friday night Muscle Car Show & Cruise at Old Town, the brick-lined entertainment district that has been part of Kissimmee since 1986. It was a little like a homecoming parade, with drivers young and old proudly showing off their immaculately turned-out cars to the eager onlookers lining the main street.

Cruising East Lake Toho

I was surprised to learn that in addition to its cruising cars, Kissimmee also has an authentic paddlewheel cruise boat. Fifteen minutes east of Kissimmee, the town of St. Cloud borders East Lake Tohopekaliga, an 11,968-acre body of water on the Kissimmee Chain of Lakes, which forms the headwaters of the Everglades.

It's here we were introduced to the Old Florida Riverboat Company, which offers 90-minute cruises here aboard the Lillie. This family-owned and operated 75-foot sternwheel paddleboat features an open top deck and a climate-controlled lower saloon, and offers a relaxing way to see this part of Florida from the water.

We took the sunset sailing, an experience made all the better by the well-stocked bar, snacks, and a refreshing lake breeze. We headed for the top deck for the best views and had to pinch ourselves: this is as authentic an Old Florida experience as you'll get anywhere.

No noise other than soft music, the slight splashing of the paddles (the vessel really is powered by them), and the occasional bit of commentary from Captain John Weaver, who, with his family, made this a memorable experience.

Adding further to the magic was seeing fireworks over Walt Disney World in the distance. Life doesn't get much better.

Exploring Beyond Kissimmee

Our choice of theme park from our Kissimmee base was the new Universal Epic Universe. Opened in May 2025 as the fourth theme park at Universal Orlando Resort, it was just a 15-mile (25-minute) drive from our Epic Portal digs. Built at a reported cost of around $7 billion, we knew it was going to be good. And the theme tied in perfectly with our mansion getaway.

Covering 110 acres, it's built around Celestial Park, a central garden and water district from which portals lead into four themed worlds: The Wizarding World of Harry Potter - Ministry of Magic, SUPER NINTENDO WORLD, How to Train Your Dragon - Isle of Berk, and Dark Universe.

The shows that each world puts on, each with incredible effects, were a highlight. Especially The Untrainable Dragon. When Toothless the black dragon soared above the audience, fulfilling the dreams of the old and young alike.

We even ventured further afield, spending an hour getting to (and from) the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Merritt Island on Florida's Atlantic coast. I'd never visited the attraction before and wasn't disappointed with my up-close look at the public side of NASA's launch site. We'd planned a full day here and saw everything, including hearing a talk by Norman Thagard, the first American to launch aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Another stop we managed to make during our stay was Gatorland, the alligator park that opened in 1949 and calls itself the "Alligator Capital of the World." Just a short drive from our Kissimmee base, it was another first-time visit for me. Seeing these American alligators up close is an experience I'll be talking about for years to come.

Kids Are Optional

If your idea of a theme park week is a hotel buffet and an early night, stay in Orlando. But if you carve some play-time potential in a home of your own, Kissimmee’s the place for you.

Spending nearly a week experiencing tasty dishes along Kissimmee’s Latin food trail, watching state-of-the-art shows at Universal Epic Universe, and meeting a genuine American astronaut was a heck of a lot of fun.

But at the end of every day, having a mansion built for play to come home to was the icing on the cake. It really was great seeing a bunch of grown-ups getting to act like kids again