Chris Curle/Special to the Eagle

A view of the many lakes in metro Orlando from Scenic Boat Tours leaving from its dock on Lake Osceola.

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As I was sayin’ — by that I refer to the chronicling of our car trip up Florida’s midsection to St. Augustine. It’s a trip worth taking, and the coming back south is as well.

To recap, I thought St. Augustine was terrific and offered hints and details about making your visit memorable. Now, as I focus on leaving there and heading home to Southwest Florida, I have a couple of parting thoughts on the St. Augustine experience.

The Old Town Trolley Tour is excellent, but beware of the pre- and post-tour trap — the Old Jail museum, built in 1891. It housed bad guys for more than 60 years.

Trouble is the tour seems to be crafted for fourth graders. A snippy lady in period costume insisted that we grown-up tourists pretend we were inmates during an interminable walking tour of bad jokes and silly allusions to the obviously horrid conditions in those bad old days.

This tacky tour featured some dinged up, scruffed up mannequins lying in jail cells, one fake alive, one fake dead, part of the adolescent drama the guide imposed on the tourists. The guide kept ordering us around and insisting we call her “ma’am.”

Having passed fourth grade, years ago and not wanting a repeat, we escaped the second-rate Cruella De Vil’s clutches and headed out of town, hoping to return soon to the 99 percent of St. Augustine that is delightful, minus the cartoon-level jail visit.

We decided to drive south via the Ocala National Forest, the 382,000-acre tract established by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. The sand pine scrub there is the largest ecosystem of its type in the world. The place also has wet prairies, live oak hammocks and swamps.

In the middle of the forest is the village of Salt Springs, including the Village Information Center. The road signs aren’t very good. In fact just past the info office is a sign on the highway informing motorists that, “you just missed” the center. We, like most others, made a U-turn.

Do not miss some of the wilderness fun, including kayaking, hiking and fishing. The area also has one of the largest black bear populations in Florida, some Indian artifacts, and a live bombing range. Yes, a bombing range, ran by the Navy.

Our destination that day was Orlando — the real Orlando, the one well north of the Disney-Universal theme parks. The area was first settled in 1843 by a Georgian named Aaron Jernigan and was named after him for a while. The name was changed to Orlando in 1857, after a settler who reportedly was killed by Indians.

What strikes a visitor to the real Orlando and its northern neighboring communities of Winter Park and College Park is the presence of so many lakes.

Downtown skyscrapers line a couple of lakes. The prestigious Rollins College, founded in 1885, has a beautiful campus worth visiting, on the banks of Lake Virginia in Winter Park. U.S. News magazine ranks Rollins the best college in the South.

A great way to see the chain of lakes of that area is via the Scenic Boat Tour in Winter Park. It’s been showing people the beautiful homes on the lakes and canals for 70 years, using 18-passenger pontoon boats from its dock on Lake Osceola. The Web site: www.scenicboattours.com/home.

The weekend we were in that area coincided with the 49th Annual Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival. It winds through the beautiful Park Avenue area, full of trendy eateries, wine bars and shops, including plenty of art galleries.

The district is a great place to visit anytime, but the art festival helped make a giant party of that weekend.

This whole area, this “other Orlando” is as far in style and ambience from Disney as Minnie Mouse is in appearance from Halle Berry.

Going south from Orlando’s northern reaches we sped by all the exits for the theme parks and related attractions and turned onto U.S. 27 and eventually to State Highway 29, down through the middle of the state.

We watched gasoline prices go up as we went down, through the lake areas of Sebring and Lake Placid and on through the orchards and farmlands to LaBelle and Immokalee. As we did on our northward leg, we avoided the casino and turned on Immokalee Road west toward Naples.

For good or ill, growth is pushing east faster than we realized. It was a short trip from the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary turnoff to the golf course communities such as TwinEagles, about six miles east of Interstate 75.

While planning this trip, we first thought of flying, but that is a complicated and pricey way to get from here to there and back. So we chose to drive and are glad we did.

Florida already is the fourth most populous state and probably will surpass New York in a decade or two.

But there’s still a lot of space out there in the middle of the state, where if they do it right, a lot of people can share the pleasures with the citrus industry, the lakes and rivers and the critters, both wild and tame that call Florida home too.

I’d much rather live here, but I’m glad we experienced out there.