as much as I moan and groan, I do legitimately like some stuff about this place. I love the riverside parks, that are always cool from the breeze; the history here, even if often short, is often quite interesting and under-reported, so I always feel like I'm really discovering something when I crack open a local history book that was last checked out in 1993 or someone posts an old photo to Facebook. I love seeing the Brightline trains shoot through downtown Melbourne, even if they don't stop there. As much of a transit advocate as I am, the driving on some of the rural highways where they haven't yet been turned into stroads by sprawl can actually be quite nice, especially around dusk, 192 and 60 are the two that spring to mind. I like the street vendors who set up under canopies on the roadside, selling watermelons, fruit juice, fresh shrimp, and bbq out of pickup trucks and full-size extension vans with labelscars from when they used to be church shuttles.
Florida's boom and bust development has created a good number of weird suburban development types, like layers in sedimentary rock; if you can persuade yourself to be interested in suburban development, there's some real oddities about. I like the sprinkles of faux-Mission style architecture, particularly the kinda square apartments that pop out in a few places in Palm Bay and Melbourne, often anachronistic to their surroundings. Despite the conservative/fascist streak, the churn of people is enough that the nice and interesting ones still pop up. Me and my dad once gave a ride to a Polish guy who was biking cross-country, and we found limping his bike on a blown tire the entire length of rural 192's shoulder. Or the very nice older woman I talked to at a St Petersburg Publix lunch table about some crimes Trump had been accused of (for the record, she believed he was plainly guilty). The lanky guy I helped do flood tearouts with in Orlovista, who wore overalls and offered his services to fix drywall (though he stressed he wasn't licensed for it professionally). An old coworker who was a bit of a libertarian and an anti-masker/vaxxer but also spoke heavily about his love for lobster rolls and had once been married & lived in China after a mescaline trip in Peru.

