We found St. Pete because our RV couldn't get over a bridge. I've seen a lot of places. I mean the sentence.
A 1987 Tiffin Allegro. Old Bertha. One day called me out of nowhere to say Bertha was one of maybe three left running in the country. I have no way to verify that. I have never once wanted to.
What Bertha could not do was elevation. No hills. No big bridges. We planned entire weeks in Google Maps on , the only routing that avoids a climb.
So: the speed of a herd of turtles, through utterly rural America, RV parks where ninety percent of the population was a retiree named John, working remote on projects I wasn't really tapped into. We saw a world I had spent most of my adult life running from. The South.
Ridiculous way to travel. Also the speed you're supposed to see a country at.
Flat the whole way. Backroads, no bridges, several extra hours, and a left turn we weren't planning to make. This is how we actually got here.
We were headed to Naples. Liz's uncle said "St. Pete" once, in passing, not even as a recommendation. Just a name in a sentence. So we came through.
And it was the list. The one Liz and I had been saying out loud to each other for two years without knowing it was a place. Walkable. Food and drinks. A soccer team. Parks, water, beaches. Young and loud and still old enough to have a history. Visibly on the way up. Almost none of the crime we both grew up next to. Alive.
Sold the RV, signed a lease two weeks later. September 2021. You know when it's it.
Felt like America and somehow a little like Europe too. Close enough to get home fast if family needed us, far enough to make our own stories. So we did. Liz and I got married here, at the . Made friends here. Made businesses here. Made memories here.
First place: three hundred and fifty square feet in a 1924 house. That was the whole apartment, not one room of it. Mold. Then termites — bad enough that for a stretch we couldn't cook dinner or turn the lights on inside our own house. We loved every minute of it. We still talk about that apartment the way people talk about a good year.
The hard part I didn't see coming: finding a new dream is harder than chasing an old one. I've made that swap badly before — chapter three, where I put a person in the empty slot. This time I put a city in it.
And a city can't leave.
I still haven't met nearly as many people here as I want to, which is an embarrassingly solvable problem that mostly requires showing up. So the list grows. Hurricane comms that work when the towers are down. A checker for the same setback and lot-coverage rules the Development Review Commission actually applies. A teardown of the permitting process, done the only honest way available — by filing through it myself. Leadership St. Pete, class of 2026, largely so I stop being a stranger.
Our life is this city. Our future is its future.
Failure isn't there. Only opportunity.
We found the best place we've ever lived because our RV couldn't climb a hill. I'd be careful about calling your constraints bad luck.