Sense of Place #3

According to the Oxford English Dictionary of Geography, sense of place is, "either the intrinsic character of a place, or the meaning people give to it, but, more often, a mixture of both." This is the best definition I could find but still did not provide me with a comfortable basis to make an assessment of what this means to me.
For the most part, I see sense of place as the attachment that someone has to a certain location or the feelings and images that they connect to it.  As it stands right now, I look around this area of SW Florida that I have just begun to consider home and view it as significantly more rural than I am used to.  I was born in New York and mostly raised in Tampa so I grew up accustomed to heavily populated areas.
When I was younger, the most contact that I had with the outdoors involved the beach, a cooler and a radio.
However, this is a completely new experience for me.  I now jump in a car with my friends and drive out to the middle of nowhere which is surprisingly not that far away. The lack of streetlights make it possible to see a multitude of stars that I never before saw when drenched under the city lights and it is amazing.  It is a completely new experience that I never appreciated until now.

Now I think of these secluded areas as untouched and beautiful as opposed to boring and lacking.  It is amazing how being here for just over a year has completely changed my opinion.  While I do miss the hustle and bustle of urban areas, this has become my escape. Laying on top of a car and listening to crickets and frogs while staring up at stars is an experience that has no equal.  Of course, living in FL this depends on whether or not the mosquitoes permit it.