Two hundred thousand people are coming to a downtown that was laid out long before cars shaped the way we build around them. Here’s how to do it right.
The Mount Dora Craft Fair takes over the historic district on Saturday and Sunday, October 24 and 25, from nine in the morning until five in the evening. More than 350 exhibitors set up along the streets, there’s live music in Donnelly Park, and admission is free. It has ranked among the best craft festivals in the country for years, and one walk down Fifth Avenue that weekend tells you why. It also tells you why the people who live downtown start planning their grocery runs around it sometime in September.
Leave the car, bring your patience
Once the barricades go up, Fifth Avenue, Baker Street, and the surrounding blocks belong to pedestrians for the weekend. Booths and music fill the streets, along with people carrying things they absolutely did not plan on buying and at least one person trying to remember where they parked. It is busy and a little chaotic, but nobody seems to mind.
The shuttle from Mount Dora Christian Academy at 301 W. 13th Ave. is there for anyone who would rather let somebody else deal with the traffic. It’s $10 a car, the money goes to school programs, and it runs from nine in the morning until five thirty in the evening. If you’d rather skip the shuttle, you can pay to park near Mount Dora High School and walk the three blocks in, and there’s limited accessible parking behind City Hall at 510 N. Baker St. But if you live close to downtown, this is the weekend you’ll be very glad your car can stay in the driveway. Grab a coffee and walk over while everybody else is still negotiating with their GPS.
And yes, parking gets creative. Locals know that hunting for the “perfect” spot usually takes longer than parking a little farther away and walking. Think of the extra steps as a perfectly reasonable excuse to pick up a pastry once you get there.
That’s one of the funny things about living near downtown Mount Dora. The same streets that feel perfect for an evening stroll on a quiet weeknight can turn into one of the busiest places in Lake County on a Saturday morning. Then, a day or two later, the booths disappear, the barricades come down, and your regular coffee run belongs to you again.
Go early, wear sneakers
Saturday morning from nine until about ten thirty is the sweet spot. The exhibitors are fresh and the air still has a little October in it. Somewhere around eleven, the crowd thickens, and by midafternoon you’re moving at the exact speed of the person in front of you.
Wear comfortable shoes. Bring some cash, because plenty of exhibitors take cards but the signal downtown gets spotty when everyone is on their phones at once. And consider leaving the dog home this year. The streets get packed, and even the sweetest, calmest dog can get overwhelmed with that many strangers. They’ll forgive you, especially if you come home with a treat.
What living in downtown Mount Dora really means
Here’s the part that doesn’t make it onto the festival map. Homes in the historic district give you something that’s surprisingly hard to find in Central Florida. You can walk to dinner, to the lake, to the shops on Fifth Avenue, to a friend’s porch on a Tuesday night. Your evenings happen on foot. For a lot of people, daily walkability is the whole dream, and they’ll gladly trade some square footage and a three-car garage to get it.
That same address also comes with roughly forty event weekends a year. Streets close. Parking disappears. Strangers stop on the sidewalk to photograph your porch, and once in a while one of them will kindly mention which ferns they would have picked. Craft Fair weekend is the biggest of those weekends, but it’s far from the only one.
Some buyers hear all of that and want in immediately. They love the energy, they love being part of it, and they figure if they wanted quiet, they’d have bought somewhere else. Other buyers hear the exact same description and start asking about homes in Eustis, where the streets are wider, the garages are bigger, and the festival is something you drive to, enjoy, and leave behind on the way home.
Both answers are correct. They’re just two different ways to love living here.
What matters is knowing which one you are before you buy. A buyer who falls for a gorgeous historic home on a calm weekday in spring can be in for a surprise the first time late October rolls around. We’d much rather have that conversation early and walk you through the event calendar. If you still love it with the whole county on the sidewalk out front, you’ll love it the rest of the year too.
For sellers downtown, the festival cuts both ways. It isn’t an ideal weekend for showings, for reasons that are probably obvious by now. It is, however, a pretty good advertisement for the lifestyle. And sometimes the visitors wandering those side streets after the booths close are the same people calling a few weeks later to ask what’s available in the historic district.
See you there
However, you get downtown that weekend, whether by shuttle, on foot from a nearby lot, or by simply stepping off your own porch, take your time. Stop for a glass of wine. Sit in Donnelly Park for a song or two before you head back into the crowd. Around two hundred thousand people will be there, and every one of them chose to spend a weekend in Mount Dora.
And if that weekend gets you wondering what it would be like to live a few blocks away, or a few miles away with a little more room to spread out, we’d love to help you figure out which one fits.
The Loretta Maimone Team is here when you’re ready.
