MEET THE NIERATKOS - THE MAILBOXES OF GULFPORT

After the brutal winter the East Coast of America has been hit with I'm ready to turn my family into snowbirds and head south to Florida from now on. I'll even deal with all their weirdness.

As Taji told you the other day, last weekend was the annual Tampa Pro contest and I've been stationed in Florida since Saturday working on more Vans Adventures, like this one:

I've tried as much as humanly possibly to bask in the sun while working. Over the past three months I started to think that the sun had died or forgotten New Jersey. This winter sucked something awful, worst I've seen in over a decade and it had me and the family losing our minds. The snow was too deep to walk the dog without losing him. Same goes for taking the baby outside. We turned into shut-ins. It used to be that when we were snowed in my wife would make pitchers of sangria and we'd sit in the hot tub watching movies all day, getting weird. But now I'm drinking for three, and drinking alone in a tub is more than slightly depressing.

So I'm thinking of buying a shack in Florida. Northeast homeowners ready to get your hearts broken? I saw nice 3-bedroom homes listed for $90,000. And the property tax is a minimal $1,000 a year…

On the way to the Tampa Airport I missed my turn and was stuck driving over a 50-mile long bridge just to make a U-turn (maybe not the best designed road system…). I turned around in a sleepy hippie town called Gulfport (affectionately known as Goof-port for its zany ways). (And also the bull dyke capital of Florida, I'm told.)

I didn't see many bull dykes in my brief visit before getting back on the longest bridge in North America but I did see a good number of wacky mailboxes. I suppose that's Gulfport's form of flair.

I stopped to take a picture of the ode to Eddie Van Halen's splatter guitar mailbox and saw the house next door was for sale for $85,000. I pictured myself living there, laughing at my friends suffering through another harsh winter and I wondered how I'd paint my mailbox.

I typed "penis mailbox" into Google images on my phone and surprisingly no one has done it yet (or at least it hasn't been documented). But an R2-D2 one has, as well as a MacBook Mailbox, a mailbox within a mailbox, and Beretta box and so on and so on…

CHRIS NIERATKO