ORLANDO - For more than a week, Rosemarie Realmuto and her daughter enjoyed the Florida that millions of people splash into every year: the stately palms, the breathtaking sunsets, the giddy escape of Disney World.
Then reality appeared, swirling like a buzz saw.
In their Orlando hotel room earlier this week, the Realmutos got spooked watching the gargantuan mass of Hurricane Frances creep across the TV screen toward the heart of Florida. Hotel staff didn't help, telling fresh stories about Hurricane Charley, of roofs being peeled off like the tops of pudding cans and bathtubs aviating on hellish winds.
With three days left in their vacation, Realmuto told her 13-year-old daughter, time to go.
"I just want to get out," she said Thursday, waiting in line at Orlando International Airport to catch a flight back to Long Island, N.Y. "This is insanity."
Oranges and margaritas and Mickey Mouse are the images sunk deep into tourist brains, not trailer homes unzipped by 140-mph winds and briny storm surge threatening to swamp condos. But Florida has a split personality disorder, and no amount of marketing can hide its deadly downside. Thousands of tourists accepted the truth Thursday and got out of Dodge.
Charley rumbled through on Aug. 13, killing 27, ravaging thousands of homes and causing an estimated $7.4-billion in damage. Now comes Frances, bigger and uglier, ominously edging toward the coast. For tourists, the signs at the airport might as well read:
Welcome to Florida.
Plywood Capital of the World.
John and Julie Fehily came all the way from England with their three children to see Disney, ride the roller coasters and feed the 12-foot alligators at Gatorland.
They wanted thrills. Just not the untamed kind.
"Now we're getting the whole shebang," Julie Fehily said.
But after planning their Florida trip for years, they couldn't let go now, they said. They were going to enjoy the sparkling promise of Florida, hurricane or no hurricane.
"This is a holiday of a lifetime," John Fehily said. Danny and Virginia Long weren't leaving, either.
"When you go into Disney, it's a whole new world," said Danny Long, 56, an elevator operator in New York City. "It's not like getting on the subway, going to work."
So for now, the Longs will enjoy Florida, including Gatorland, where on Thursday they were feeding bread to a dozen impossibly pink flamingos. When Hurricane Frances muscles through, they'll be hunkered down in their well-scrubbed Disney hotel, not cursing their luck from their flat in Brooklyn.
At Disney, the brochure boasts, "Fantasy reigns." Except on Saturday, when the park will be closed. But on Thursday, it was almost business as usual.
"We tried (to leave). We're stuck," Shelly Antkowiak said, rocking her grandbaby in a stroller.
She, her daughter, her stepson and her three grandchildren wanted to go home to Michigan, but they couldn't get an early flight. So they said a few prayers and headed for the theme parks.
"We're hoping to go to MGM tomorrow," she said, laughing.
Workers said attendance was down by half, but still, thousands of people wandered the Magic Kingdom, all shades and smiles and suntan lotion.
Somehow, they must have missed the pine trees leaning at hard angles along the entrance road, evidence of recent hurricane-force winds. Or maybe they were just distracted by signs for the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
"Surreal" is how Zachory Beers described Disney on Thursday. Next to the Seven Dwarfs mine, he waited with a snoozing baby while his wife and other child got dizzy on the Dumbo ride.
"This is the greatest place on earth," said Beers of Olympia, Wash. "But in three days, all these garbage cans will be blowing around."
Elsewhere in Florida, hundreds of thousands of motorists were clogging I-4 and I-95 and National Guard troops were mobilizing for the third time in a month (Tropical Storm Bonnie came ashore a few weeks ago). Gov. Jeb Bush was on TV, essentially telling Florida residents in the hurricane's projected path to get out, now.
Haukor Hermannsson shrugged.
"I'm not so worried," said Hermannsson, 55, strolling Disney's Main Street USA with his wife and grandson. "I can't do anything about it."
Hermannsson, of Iceland, said he has been to Florida five times, including 1992, when Hurricane Andrew rocked the Miami area.
Even with a hurricane now and then, Florida is irresistible, he said.
So sunny. So hot.
So not Iceland.
State tourism officials say they do not know how much short-term damage Charley and Frances have done to the industry.
A good portion of the state's 75-million annual visitors come during the summer, but the run-up to Labor Day isn't what it used to be, with the nation's schools starting earlier than ever. And while thousands of tourists fled the storms, many have been forced to extend their vacations when they couldn't take their scheduled flights home, said Tom Flanigan, spokesman for Visit Florida, the state's official tourism marketing corporation.
Long term, Flanigan said, Florida's image is intact. Even back-to-back monster hurricanes aren't enough to ding it.
Hurricane Andrew "received an immense amount of publicity, too," he said. But "people have short memories."
And truth be told, there are plenty of disasters besides natural ones.
Back at Disney, Mike Belton said he and his wife thought for two minutes about returning early to New York City. But with the Republican National Convention clogging the streets, they figured they would take their chances in Florida.
"We're from New York," Belton said. "We're not scared of anything."
