I’ve visted Tampa a couple times and like it a lot. St. Pete OTOH is kinda small and dullish.
I think Irvine, CA has a street like this. I could swear it does, because I remember seeing a street sign with the same street name on both parts.
Forgot to add it’s a really good idea to check out your final destination on Google Maps or Yahoo Maps and use the satellite + map view to really see where you’re going. Doing that has saved my bacon plenty of times.
Hey now, I leave in Clearwater and commute to Tampa, and while you’re right about the sun, the traffic actually works out pretty well.
The Causeway is always wide-open in the morning heading east (westbound is jam packed). Ditto for the Howard Frankland - going home, I always see the eastbound traffic jammed up to the hump, but I average 70 MPH on bridge heading westbound home.
I think its much better to live in Pinellas and work in Tampa than the other way around.
They’re the Norfolk Tides now. We’ve got a problem with region identity 'round here. Don’t know whether to call ourselves residents of Hampton Roads, Norfolk, Tidewater (which, I believe, is also used by an area up in Maryland), Virginia Beach - you get the picture.
And we have a weird stretch of road, an interstate no less. For about 10 miles, I-64 East runs primarily in a western direction, and of course I-64 West runs eaternly for the same amount.
As for Tampa, I was there once, visiting my sister, when she lived in Hudson. Can’t say I remember too much of the layout there, but then again we were only there for one day. But since my ex-wife lives down there now, there’s no way I’ll see that town again anytime soon.
Not even close.
Look up Woodinville, Washington. Go ahead, zoom in. Make sure the Tylenol is close by.
That’s especially useful if you’re going to a big retail area with several different malls or mini-malls and you just have an address. It can tell you, oh, it’s in the shopping center with the Wal-Mart, or it’s one of those free-standing places next to the banks. Really helpful.
Of course, Google can’t help you if you have your Peachtree Avenue confused with your Peachtree Road.
His letters home were all postmarked “Tampa”.
OK, that’s pretty fucking awful.
Do you have the same fucked up address scheme as Manhattan, where there is zero correlation between numbered streets and the addresses between them?
That’s fucked up. I knew even before looking it up that it must be one of those satellite communities around Seattle. Every frickin’ town has the same stupid numbering scheme, and each seems to start with a new numbering scheme that’s just off enough to completely screw you up. The streets are not even close to being orthogonal, plus almost none of them go all the way through so why go with a precise street numbering scheme when the topography is absolute chaos?
Well of course they were! Would you want anyone to know that you’re staying in Bradenton?!
Modern historians hypothesize that de Soto took the opportunity to mail his letters during secret visits to the Tampa area, where the local Tocobaga people had developed the most sophisticated lap dancing practices of any New World culture (a tradition that continues even today).
applauds RedRoses rant Yay! I’ve had to go to downtown Tampa a couple times … it’s usually requires medication afterwards.
I agree with the sports team rant as well, I wouldn’t care if the Bucs were just the “Tampa Bucs” if we had actually been able to name our baseball the St. Pete Devil Rays* instead of having to follow that stupid “Hey! Let’s share!” naming convention. They’re our [sub]sucky[/sub] baseball team! I have a theory, maybe they wouldn’t be sucky if they didn’t have to carry that “Tampa Bay” around.
*Actually, Devil Rays, is a stupid name too. Who voted for that?
The Mutiny, however, was an awesome team name. Too bad no one likes soccer in America.
Hey, Red, I see you’re still a guest. Gonna stick around?
Sadly, Tampa’s street system never fully recovered from the ill-fated “Gasparilla Experiment” of 1943, a top-secret project by military and civic leaders to harness eldritch otherworldly forces in an attempt to transform Tampa into a worthwhile place to live. Rumor has it that the experiment, conducted in a secret hangar at Henderson Army Air Field, utilized powerful electromagnetic fields to induce a highly distorted region of local spacetime.
The results were catastrophic; whole city blocks were rotated through parallel dimensions, their streets and avenues physically warped into a strange and terrible labyrinth of non-Euclidean geometry. Several miles of Florida Avenue and Nebraska Avenue materialized in the same place, fused at the molecular level into a completely new entity, Floribraska Avenue.
Civil engineers from the Department of Public Works were driven mad as they struggled vainly to comprehend the chaos, raving of streets which seemed to *twist * and writhe unnaturally, intersecting at impossibly hideous angles. This legacy of heritable insanity can be observed to this day in such dread manifestations as the I-275 ‘Malfunction Junction’ downtown expansion project.
I hope that means you want me to stick around. 
But yes, as soon as I have money, I plan on getting a subscription. Assuming, of course, I can leave my house to go to work, because currently I am unemployed and sitting on my ass on the SDMB all day.
Yep. Red is showing signs of Goat Syndrome. It won’t be long now.
My husband and I had trouble finding our way through Tampa one night. There just weren’t enough road signs. We were looking for a bridge. Finally the road curved sharply to the left and ahead of us we could see what appeared to be numerous pairs of headlights descending from the sky. Freaking Tampa Bay Bridge!
It was even worse in daylight. The bridge was new at that time and had been built to replace part of the bridge which had collapsed after a vessel of some sort hit it. The old bridge was still there and you could see where it stopped and cars went over. I don’t know why they left that up. It was sickening.
That’s the Sunshine Skyway. Actually never touches Tampa – connects St Pete to Terra Ceia via I-275. The old bridge has had its center spans removed completely and the remaining approaches have been converted into fishing piers.
As far as RedRose goes, I’m not much on Tampa either and am firmly convinced that I live on the better side of the Bay.
You’re talking about the heart of downtown, I’m talking about the whole rest of the city, where you can be on the same street, but have it change names every other block, or where a highway suddenly turns into a city street, then back into a highway again (Briley Parkway, anyone?), or how they decided to “solve” a traffic problem, by changing the number of the interstates on one stretch (I-65 became I-265 and I-265 became I-65). I won’t even get into their habit of spending 50 years building a 5 mile stretch of road, or how they tear up a section of the street, putting up barrels and those concrete walls of death[sup]TM[/sup], and then just leave it like that for years.
Having a job is by no means a requirement to post on this board.
What kind of employment are you looking for?