I was used to much colder winters before moving to Tampa, Florida.
I was a snowbird at first, a transplant from the northern midwest who would drive down in early December when temperatures in my home state would plummet below freezing.
By then we might have a blizzard at least once after autumn advances into winter, but it was almost a guarantee that temperatures would get into the teens at least once during this time. That cold weather gets more noticeable with age, and I’m not exactly sure why. Count that was one among many reasons you see a lot of retirees moving down south to various coastal cities in Florida like Tampa, Sarasota, Naples, Miami, and Pensacola. However, people come down here in the winter and expect there to be beach weather. That’s not a reasonable expectation. While there are fantastic beaches in the Tampa Bay area, you could show up in the middle of January with 30 degree temperatures and find yourself extremely disappointed. We had a particularly cold winter this year in Tampa, Florida. I was driving down interstate 75 headed south to Palmetto when I heard on the radio that temperatures would hit 30 degrees the following morning. I thought we might actually get snowflakes this time, but we didn’t. My friend living in Ocala said his thermometer outside read 28 degrees at one point but they didn’t get snow flurries either. While it might seem impossible, this actually happened on January 19, 1977 when Tampa had multiple inches of snow on the ground, covering rooftops and automobiles.