Florida House Hunting

After delaying our plans to move to Florida for a year due to COVID-19, we finally set up our house hunting trip for February 2021. We had a not-too-early flight from Chicago to Tampa, which amazing took off on time and landed slightly early.

Riverstone

We picked up our rental car at Tampa airport and decided to drive up I-4 to Lakeland. Our first stop was Smokin' Aces BBQ & Steakhouse in Plant City. The service was great but the food was a long time coming. But the BBQ was worth the wait. It started raining hard while we were in the restaurant but luckily it mostly stopped as we headed further east.

We drove to the Riverstone community in South Lakeland. We liked the overall community of Riverstone but there was not a lot in the immediate area, although a Publix was being built right next to the community. Our first stop was at Riverstone by Centex Homes. The bedrooms were a decent size but the master bathrooms were small with small showers. We headed next to Seasons at Riverstone by Richmond American Homes. We liked these homes a lot better.

Lakeland

We took a backroad over to where there were some restaurants and then drove up towards I-4. The light rain turned into a torrential downpour as we drove through a number of small towns. We drove past I-4 to KB Home Cayden Reserve, which we drove through as well as a Highland Homes community, but we didn't like this area so we struck those off our list. We drove back to our hotel in Brandon and made a stop at Publix. We weren't particularly hungry so we grabbed some snacks and ate in the room before turning in for the night.