Before I moved to the Tampa Bay area, I was living down in Fort Lauderdale with my girlfriend of five years.
We tried to live in Miami but found that we could only afford housing in some of the worst and most dangerous parts of the city.
While Fort Lauderdale wasn’t a lot better, there were at least a lot of suburban neighborhoods along the outskirts of the city by the Sawgrass Expressway. Many of these neighborhoods are extremely serene and gorgeous in the architecture and landscaping, especially in the more affluent parts of town. However, the company employing me had to move to the Tampa Bay area to merge with the corporation that purchased them just months prior. Since I was just happy to keep my job at all, I didn’t complain about having to uproot our lives to follow this business to the other side of the state. I figured the weather would stay largely the same, but it’s not. We live near the border to Ybor City and there are a lot of rain showers that roll in from Old Tampa Bay throughout the late spring and summer seasons. The weather sometimes isn’t as hot as Fort Lauderdale because Tampa is further away from the equator by a hundred miles or so. Yet, this weekend I hear that temperatures are going to be in the high 90s for both Ybor City and East Tampa. I might get overheated while I’m out hiking Saturday afternoon, so I better prepare with extra water and sunscreen for the time I spend outdoors.