Title: Hotels, Motels, and Inns of Florida
Author: Kristen Hale
Size: 6 x 9
Binding: Softcover
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9781681064796
Price: $27.00

For generations, tourists have packed into trains, loaded up cars, and filed onto planes with one destination in mind-—the Sunshine State. As the first railways ventured into Florida, palatial hotels lured travelers south. Those hotels were the awinter settings of the Gilded Age for a few decades, then barracks for members of the military during World War II, then renovated, then forgotten, and at last revived. Their more humble neighbors, Florida’s inns and motels, rose with adventurous budget travelers and the times, including the road-trippers of the 1950s and ’60s. 

Today, you can visit Florida and stay just about anywhere you like-—rental homes on the beach, high-rises in Miami, houseboats in the Keys. But many of Florida’s original lodgings remain, and a few of them are even run by generations of the same family. And you don’t have to be a tourist to visit them. 

Here you’ll find a Spanish-Moorish palace that went from grand hotel to county courthouse to grand hotel again, the lodge on a spring where a 1950 sci-fi classic was filmed, the hotel where NASCAR was born, the motel where Martin Luther King Jr. honed his “I Have a Dream” speech, and the inn that served as a display case for its owner’s eccentric antiques collection. Despite time and hurricanes and swanky house-shares, Florida’s historic hotels, motels, and inns are still open, offering a bit of living history for a nightly rate. 

Join Florida author Kristen Hare on a virtual trip to discover these histroic gems and beloved places to stay in Florida.