New Yorkers if you decide to leave NY, do not come to Florida. It is a god forsaken place. Yeah it has palm trees and beaches, but it also has alligators. LOTS of alligators. If you go to a body of water and the water in it is wet you can be sure there is a big hungry alligator lurking in it. The exception is the at the beaches. There are no gators in the salt water because they avoid the schools of killer sharks.
The gators get a lot of competition from the huge pythons. Pythons like gators love your pets and children, if you get my drift.(We’re hoping the recently introduced monitor lizards will help control the gators and snakes. They may be aggressive too, but we think they might mellow out with time.)
Then there are the mosquitoes. Most people in Florida can’t give blood because they don’t have enough to spare due to mosquito bites. It’s not only that they’re big, they’re plentiful too. And they are hardy down here; the other day I watched a couple of them consume a can of “Backwoods Off”.
Did I mention the ubiquitous fire ants? Most people don’t worry about stepping on a nest of them, because it’s normally too hot and humid to go outside most days anyway. They rarely get in homes, but sometimes for unknown reasons they tend to get in hurricane evacuation shelters. But you’ll probably only be in a hurricane shelter for a couple weeks each year. Fortunately the stings only hurt and itch profusely for a few days.
I would really recommend not going any further south than Maryland unless you’re a bitter clinger MAGA type that deserves the punishment Florida inflicts on it’s inhabitants.
You forgot to mention the Palmetto bugs which manage to get onto to nearly every plate of food in the state. Big, ugly and dirty looking.
You probably let that slip by because you’re used to the taste by now.
At least Florida is better than Colorado. I can’t even bring myself to list the horrors here.