98 Degrees

People tend to think you're crazy when you leave Tampa to go to Minnesota for a vacation in February, but we did it. The husband and daughter had never been in Minnesota in the winter and he thinks he wants to live there full time when he retires from the Army (whenever that turns out to be). Of course they had a freak "heat" wave while he was there and he didn't even see temps below zero. Daughter and I left a few days after he had to be back to work so we enjoyed a temp of -23 when we left on Friday. It was 75 when we pulled into Port Tampa. All the way down we'd been pulling for 77 degrees to have a nice even 100 degree temperature difference, but I guess 98 degrees is remarkable enough. It's easy to forget how big our country is until you drive from 70 miles south of the Canadian border to Tampa in 3 days. Just when I think we've malled, and chain stored, and homogenized things to death I remember how, in a way, place still defines us. Maybe it's not the place, but the weather that says who we are.