I used to live in the Tampa Bay area, but keep fleeing northward as the
baseline keeps shifting: my uncle from New Jersey recently called Clearwater Beach paradise; I call it a hotel-covered shithole with pea-soup water because I remember what it was like in 1978.
I started visiting the keys for snorkelling around 2000. Each year, everything just gets worse yet more expensive: there is no off-season and you have to pay hotel fares to camp in a nasty car park. An old timer I met who lived in the keys in 195X said you could camp anywhere and snorkel off the beach in crystal-clear water back then. Since the 1950s, the equivalent of the entire population of Australia (pop. went from <2 to 20+ million) moved to Florida, and quality of life gets worse and worse, but new clueless suckers keep moving here....
Say goodbye to this:
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and hello to a whole lot more of this:
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