How do you freeze on a Florida vacation? Perhaps the most fun way is to visit the ICE! attraction at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee.
We ventured down to the Gaylord Palms convention center on Sunday morning to check out ICE!
The attraction is housed in a gigantic freezer chilled to 9 degrees. We lined up and were led into a pre-show area, where a film was shown that explained how the ICE! attraction is made.
A crew of sculptors from Harbin, China, comes to the United States each year to carve the ICE! attractions at the four Gaylord resorts around the country. It takes them several weeks and nearly 2 million pounds of ice to complete the scenes.
I was lucky enough to be able to watch some of these Chinese artists at work at the Gaylord Opryland last month. Click here to watch the video I made of them carving the sculptures.
The attraction provides everyone with a shiny blue parka to wear inside. We snapped ours up and headed into the cold.
Talk about your winter wonderlands! We were surrounded by ice sculptures. It is so hard to describe how amazing this is – it’s something you should definitely see for yourselves! Even when you walked up steps and through doorways, they were made of ice.
I especially loved the room filled with brightly colored, giant Christmas ornaments. We sat on Santa’s (icy!) knee, and then it was on to the slides…
That’s right. Slides. There is a room with giant ice slides you can go down. Gerard and Gracie had a great time giving them a try.
The final scene at ICE! is a nativity carved out of crystal-clear ice. It is just breathtaking.
Click here to view my pictures from ICE! at the Gaylord Palms Resort.
After we re-entered the real Florida climate, it was off to pick up our free cups of hot chocolate and warm up a little.
Then we went upstairs to change out of our wintry garb and headed to the Villa de Flora restaurant for Sunday brunch. Station after station was set up with all kinds of offerings, from breads to salads to bacon and eggs. There was an omelet station where the chefs would make one exactly to your liking, as well as a section with carved roast beef and pork.
Gracie had great fun decorating waffles with whipped cream, strawberries AND chocolate chips. And the dessert station had a chocolate fondue pot with fruit, cookies and even Rice Krispie treats for dipping.
During brunch we had two surprise guests at our table. First, Mrs. Claus came by to check on Gracie and let us know that Santa was quite busy making his list. Then a strolling magician stopped by to do a few card tricks. He had Gracie laughing hysterically.
We left Villa de Flora stuffed and knew we wouldn’t be worrying about where to eat dinner Sunday night!
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