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Coming to Celebration

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Celebration's downtown

Celebration Hotel and downtown

Turning into Celebration, I leave the clamorous strip -- a guide for Route 192 outside Celebration lists twenty-four tourist attractions, one hundred eleven inns or motels, eighty restaurants, sixty-one shopping places, and thirty-six other commercial locales -- and once I pass the town's white vinyl fence, I get a tasteful, relaxing impression. The rural-looking fence, the modest signage, the reduced traffic, the open spatial rhythm, and the traditional house styles give all the right cues for someone of my class and age. Before coming to the town itself I pass green fields punctuated by widely spaced larger buildings. In the town, the houses seem welcoming, the colors are lighter, there is none of the random mixture and abruptness of the strip. There are larger spatial forms within the town: a crescent of town houses, several blocks of houses along a little stream on a boulevard, and others set around differently shaped parks; a small lake fronts the town center. Uses and norms seem predictable and familiar. Compared to the strip, there is space to look around; I do not have to focus narrowly on my goal because I am free from the strip's pulls and distractions.