My Country Living & City Life, Florida is the Best of Both Worlds

If you’ve been following me on Instagram, you would’ve seen some of the pictures I posted about what looks like a real country life!

I joke with my husband often about where we live and how country it feels. He then hit me with the title of this blog post, “Country & City Life, You have the best of both worlds!”

True statement.

Country Living

On one picture I posted with my daughter standing next to a cow, a friend commented, “You moved to the country part of Florida?” My response was, “No, just our block!”

It’s true. We don’t live in a subdivision (although they have many of them right down the street from us), we live in a neighborhood. One long country (to me) road. Everyone has land and some people have more animals than the common house pet.

When I look out of my bedroom window, the neighbor behind us has cows, horses, and chickens. There are at least 3-4 people on this block with cows & chickens! My daughter’s new friend that she met at the bus stop brought us a basket of fresh eggs from their chicken farm on Friday afternoon.

I was afraid to eat them, being all citified and what not. But we boiled them on up, added some salt and pepper, and they were fine.

Also, on my road (I feel funny saying street) there is a strawberry farm. A HUUUGGEE strawberry farm. It’s towards the end of the road and we ride our bikes down there to see them getting the land ready for the next years crop.

Everyone knows everyone on this block and seems to genuinely care. As my daughter and I walked home from the bus stop in the street, twice in one week, 2 different people stopped us. They were upset that the bus didn’t come to our home and made us walk a good distance in the street. They both gave me the # to our county’s bus system and said submit a ticket. They both had connections and said they would look out for us to have it changed. These were two different people, two different households! One even offered … more eggs!!

Guess what happened? Friday, my daughter was dropped off in front of our home!

City Living

Now although our block resembles more country living, when you drive outside of our neighborhood you enter suburban life. There are beautiful homes, schools and just the scenery is amazing. If you go 10 more minutes, you enter Tampa. The big city! It’s similar when I lived in Georgia. I didn’t actually live in Atlanta (no one did). You lived in a smaller city and went to Atlanta when you needed too.

It’s the same thing here. Tampa, apparently is where it all goes down and I’ve yet to venture there for night life or date nights. It’s coming soon. I’m already working on a post about the best places for Tampa Date Nights when you are new to the area.

Tampa, like Atlanta, gives you a great city experience in addition to beaches. You can’t live in Florida and not enjoy a good pool or beach experience. I’ve been to two malls in Tampa and one city beach so far. Unfortunately, the first beach had brown murky water & my children were looking at me like, “Who is supposed to get in this?” So, we are on the hunt for a better beach.

Living Arrangements:

If you read my initial post about my housing situation, you would know our fixer upper wasn’t ready and we were staying with my in-laws. Well, glory be to God – we moved in this past Friday!

We spent our first night in there Friday night. We popped a little Moscato to celebrate! (Thanks Carlinda!)

 

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