The condos, the stores, the traffic, and the crowds describe any big city. Add the heat and humidity and I don’t quite understand it myself.
There are other Floridas, though, away from the crowds and tourists and tucked between shading trees and natural springs. There are beaches almost nobody goes to, and slate-grey days when I have had long stretches of them entirely to myself. There is wilderness in abundance - not the soaring majesty of mountains and old-growth forest, but lazy rivers and winding trails and level bike paths that cut through hammocks and prairies to take your quiet council with the gators.
But fuck, some days you really do have to wave the white flag and let your A/C fight your battles for you.
A lifetime ago, I was stationed in Orlando for about six months. My dad came to visit. We were eating lunch one day and he asked me why I was always complaining about Orlando. I asked him what he saw out the window. “Strip club, fast food joint, strip club, used car lot, strip club, strip club, …”, then he (an urban planner) said, “but every town has a street like this”. “Dad, this isn’t a ‘street like this’. This is Orlando.”
I’ve lived here all my life, and never gotten used to the heat. However, I’m sitting here at work wearing a sweater because they crank that AC!
We have hurricanes…when I hear about places dealing with wildfires or earthquakes, I feel fortunate.
There are also some very beautiful places in Florida, and they aren’t far from the ugly places.
Florida does possess one of the lowest tax burdens for a hypothetical “average” family of any state. And there are advantages to having a Publix supermarket on every corner (or at least it seemed that way the last time I drove through Fort Myers). A week in coastal Florida during the winter or early spring for major league baseball spring training is a very nice break from the cold and damp.
Having endured Houston-area summers, the idea of year-round Florida has limited appeal, along with traffic snarls and hordes of wrinkly sun-parched retirees. Sometime I think it might be nice to live off the beaten track somewhere with citrus, avocado trees and other tropical plantings. Then I remember the joys of tracking tropical disturbances on the National Hurricane Center maps and my back recalls filling sandbags.
For decades now, newcomers to Florida have expressed a desire to pull in the welcome mat and stop development, but they haven’t had much luck.
No appeal for me because there are SO many people! Way too many! Mostly crowded along the coasts. I left there in 1997 and the population has grown by over 7,000,000.
Then again, I grew up more or less on the Texas Gulf Coast, so I’ve more or less had my fill of beaches/water sports, and the presence of the sea doesn’t have a huge amount of novelty either. Nor do sun, heat, etc… It’s like where I grew up, just further east.
I feel like if I want to go to a beach, I’m going to want to go to Hawaii or maybe somewhere interesting like the South of France, Bali or maybe Australia. I know they’re not interesting to the people who live there, but they’re sufficiently different to be interesting to me. Florida is way too similar to hold any charm whatsoever.
When used to fly to Florida, I swear that I could smell mold coming into the aircraft cabin beginning over Georgia and then for the rest of the flight. Otherwise, I don’t consider it worse or better than any other state. It just has it’s own differences, like Palmetto bugs, that make it different than the north.
My friends tell me I’m missing the point, which is “BABES IN BIKINIS”. I point out that also comes with, urk, “MEN WHO REALLY SHOULDN’T WEAR SPEEDOS”.
But I do wish that the stores up north here would feature a “Florida week” in February. Sell key-lime pie filling, those specialty tropical fruit jellies that come in spherical glass containers, orange-blossom honey…all the foodstuffs that you see in tourist traps.
Though when that happens, other parts of the country and the world (even inland or high altitude places) are also going to be under water, or otherwise suffer the effects of climate change.
I’ve never been, and other than to cross it off my list of states I haven’t been to, I have no desire to go. It just sounds like a miserable place, with the heat and the humidity and the alligators and the giant flying cockroaches. The Disney parks have no appeal to me.
If I was going to go, I’d probably head to someplace on the gulf in the panhandle like Destin. My brother and his family frequently vacation there, and the pictures of the beach always look nice.
I’ve visited a few times. I find the entire state ugly. Beaches aren’t bad, but I prefer a beach on a lake, where there’s something in the background instead of the flat sea.
But it’s flat and scrubby, and the buildings are all ugly pastels and look run down when they’re new. Everything, including nature, seems washed out.
Heat is not a selling point. Disney World is a great place to visit, but outside of the property, there’s not much that appeals to me
My sister lives in South Florida. In my single days I’d go down to visit every Winter for a week at a time. Sure beats Michigan winter. I’d time my visit for late Feb. or early March, about the time Winter seemed like it would never end and cabin fever insanity was at its worst. Made several trips with Mrs. solost and the kids too, but not for many years now- first the kids got too old to want to travel with their parents but were too young to leave alone. Then Covid.
I’d probably put Florida firmly in the “nice place to visit but wouldn’t want to live there” category. The drive down the Keys to Key West is very nice. The Everglades is a fascinating ecosystem, despite the damage done by humans. Maybe we’ll go for a visit this Winter.
A number of my clients have a house here in Ohio, but have a motorhome that they use to escape the winters, letting them choose what southern areas they want to visit.
There are some interesting-looking museums in Oklahoma City. If I had the opportunity to make an extended layover at OKC, I might try to hit up the Cowboy Museum or the Museum of Osteology.
I never understood the attraction Florida has. Even in the dead of winter, it is…damp.
A few years ago, the President of our business unit (~$10B in size) decided to do some reorganizing. One of the outcomes was a decision to establish a “center of excellence” in Florida where we had a moderate sized facility. So, a communication goes out announcing that engineers working on certain programs and areas would be receiving transfer requests in order to fit the new organization. If the request was refused, then the future of the engineer in the company might need to be evaluated.
A few months later, I was talking to a director in HR and the topic of the transfers came up. She said that the acceptance rate for transfers to Florida was “in the single digit percentages”. Shortly after that conversation, a new campaign was announced - “bring the work to the workers”. The transfers were never mentioned again.
Where were the engineers that they wanted to transfer? Primarily in the South Bay of Los Angeles (Beach Cities) and North County San Diego. For some odd reason, the prospect of Florida beaches and sunshine didn’t seem to do the trick…
I see that the Horn Canna Festival is due the last Saturday in September so if it’s not too late, make plans to visit the farm and enjoy the sights of downtown Carnegie, OK. It’s what’s happening in western Caddo County!
Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund CEO of Citadel Securities, has made news that he is bailing on Chicago and moving the whole business to Miami citing Chicago crime as his main reason. He recently bought a record-breaking home in Miami. His neighbors (also very wealthy) are apparently not so happy with it.
