I just emerged from a truly nightmarish 36 hours of travel. No, I wasn't coming from Calcutta. Only Northern California, with multiple hours spent idling on various tarmacs, sleeping on the airport floor, that kind of thing.

But then I got home to find the first copy of my new book at my front door. It looks like this. And you can buy it here.

Leafing through it with wonderment and joy, it dawned on me that Kissimmee has a raw deal. Kissimmee has a love/hate relationship with Orlando. Orlando is the big Kahuna, the main event, and Kissimmee seems fated to be the red-headed stepchild, an also-ran. Even the convention and visitor’s bureau tagline subtly reinforces this: “Make more dreams come true.” So, your main dream involves mouse ears, but if you’re not done dreaming, we’ve got some others we’d like you to test drive.

Well, there’s one arena in which Kissimmee dominates, leaving Orlando quivering and chagrined. It’s the phenomenon of the Dinner Adventure. This is not your father’s murder-mystery dinner theater. We’re talking pageantry, death-defying feats of agility and cunning, costumes, whooping-and-hollering, all witnessed while gnawing on regulation medieval turkey legs and such. Many of these shows draw 1,000 people at a time, two shows a night, every night of the year.

The granddaddy of them all is the Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament (mostly because there are too few places where you have a waitress in medieval garb saying, “Hi, I’m Heather and I’ll be your wench tonight” and in which you eat sans utensil, with only a napkin assist), but Arabian Nights Dinner Attraction is way up there, too. Orlando has Dolly Parton's Dixie Stampede Dinner & Show and Pirate's Dinner Adventure, and SeaWorld has Makahiki Luau Polynesian Feast & Celebration and Disney has the Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue, but Kissimmee's offerings really kick all their butts.

What makes these things good is that the tables set up in long rows around an arena and each diner gets a color marker (in the case of Medieval Times you wear a colored paper "crown" of crepe paper) that identifies them with a section of fellow diners and a particular knight—it encourages tribal behavior, bonding and robust catcalling. All things you want maximize while dining.

You can read about it in my book.