Before I moved I had many people ask me why I was going to leave Florida and to this day I still have people ask me why I left "sunny Florida" to go Rochester NY where many people seem to believe it might as well be the arctic circle. The bottom line is that I lived in Florida for over 24 years and I honestly grew to dislike the state. It was a state in the south but I never knew what "southern hospitality" was until I met people from Georgia and Louisiana. I also am one who really loves cold weather and am not a big fan of the heat. I am all about the mantra "you can always put clothes on but you can only take so much off." Much of my wife's family lives in Rochester as well so that made moving away from my family easier to deal with. All in all, I like it up here.
The trip up was an adventure though. Since we had two cats and a dog to move up it made things a little more complicated. We rented a POD to load everything in and had it shipped out and put in storage. This made things easy because we didn't have to rent a moving truck just to load it up, drive it up and then unload it into storage. That was the easy part. The hard part was loading the rest of our stuff, the animals, the animal stuff and still fitting myself and my wife into a Mustang and an F-150. It was a lot harder than you might imagine. I got the dog, my wife got the two cats. The cats have always behaved better with her and the dog behaved better with me so it fit.
We lucked out and hit beautiful weather up the east coast the whole ride up. We didn't have the luxury to take a lot of time driving up. This was due to the animals so we drove the 22+ hour journey stopping every couple hours to let the animals stretch (it made a good excuse for bathroom breaks for me) and had one hotel stop. I have to thank Howard Johnson for letting our pets stay with us for a very small per night charge (Note: I do not personally know Howard Johnson or anyone named Howard or Johnson). For such a cheap rate it was a really nice hotel. Maybe it was just a bad part of town in Richmond Va. where we stopped? It looked good to me....
We loaded back up and 14 hours later we were in Rochester and we haven't looked back since!
Since I had lived in Florida primarily all of my life I never faced a real winter with real white stuff falling from the sky. They call that snow!!!! It took a lot to get used to, shoveling, driving almost sideways while your vehicle slides down the road. But all in all, it could have been a lot worse.
I have met some great people in the "North" and am fortunate to be able to call a few of them friends. They say the grass is always greener on the other side but I went from green to white on the ground and I love it!
To each his own, brother. I am from Georgia. You and I live in the same part of Rochester. I have said it before: You don't have to shovel sunshine.
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