Travelling in St. Pete Florida - Day One

We're travelling in St. Pete Beach, Florida right now and I thought I'd try out blogging from my Treo.

The trip has been perfect. We're staying in the Sirata Hotel right on the beach. It's probably one of the nicest resorts on the strip.

We've been checking out the different neighborhoods to see where we'd eventually like to move and asking the locals about their opinions.

We decided we wanted to take Gulf Blvd north, head up towards Tarpan Springs, and make stops along the way to see the towns. Our 1st reaction is "wow there is a real spotty mix of estates, condos, and trailers right on top of each other. What a strange mix. This isn't going to be easy.

First we drove through St Pete Beach into Treasure Island. Ok, it's nice but a little touristy (if that's a word). So we pushed on.

Then we went through Indian Rock Beach and crossed over to Alt 19 before getting into Downtown Clearwater. This was the 1st sign that there were places we might be able to find work outside of Tampa, but it didn't look like the right place to live. We didn't have a chance to head into Clearwater Beach that day, but we wanted to come back and see more of that area as well.

Next along the route was Dunedin. Before we'd even been there, we had an idea of what it might be like and were hopeful it might be a prospective destination for us based on some previous googling. We walk around the main village area and had some Mexican food. We had talked to Wendy's dad on the phone while we were there and he expressed how much he liked it there, so we went exploring some more. From what we'd seen so far, it was really quaint, so we drove around town some more, but it wasn't very impressive as far as housing was concerned. I don't think it's the place for us. We were getting discouraged at this point and feared we were going to see more of the same everywhere else. Leaving town and being stuck for several miles behind this barnacle encrusted gheto bucket in-toe that someone calls their boat only made matters worse. But we would not let this sway us off coarse to finding our future home.

Next on the hit-list was Tarpan Springs. As we enterred town we knew that this place was different. We saw a really nice shopping area near the Pinellis County Trail and decided to head towards the water into an area known as Spongeorama. Weird name, huh. It's called that after the sea sponge beds that are found in abundance there. This is, by far, the nicest area we've seen. The properties and houses were spectacular, lots of lush green-space, nice shopping... Where do I sign up.