Nothing on this list is dangerous. All three are famous for ruining a first visit purely because nobody mentioned them.
Lovebugs
Twice a year, roughly in spring and again in late summer, the air fills with small black flies joined end to end, drifting in slow clouds. They do not bite, sting or carry anything. They are simply everywhere for a couple of weeks, and then they are gone.
The real victim is your car. Lovebugs plaster a windscreen and front bumper in minutes on a highway, and the remains are mildly acidic — left baking on paint for days, they can mark it.
The trick: wash the front of the car sooner rather than later during a flight, and soak rather than scrub. A wet cloth laid over the mess for a few minutes lifts it far better than force, which grinds it into the paint. Drive at dusk or early morning during a heavy flight and you will hit fewer of them.
No-see-ums
Biting midges, barely visible, which is the entire problem. They appear around dawn and dusk, favour still air near water, and bite in a way that itches out of all proportion to their size — often hours later, which is why people blame the wrong place.
The trick that surprises people: ordinary insect screens do not stop them. They pass straight through standard mesh, which is why you can be bitten on a screened porch. What does work is moving air — a fan on a porch makes you effectively unreachable, because they are weak fliers. Repellent helps, long sleeves at dusk help, and the breezy side of a building is better than the sheltered side.
The afternoon storm
Covered in the August piece, but it belongs on any list of things that catch visitors out: through the summer, most afternoons produce a short violent thunderstorm, and it is the normal weather rather than an event.
The trick: stop treating it as a ruined day. Do the outdoor thing in the morning, have an indoor option for mid-afternoon, and come back out afterwards when it is cooler, cleaner and quieter. The only part to take seriously is the lightning, and the rule is simple: thunder means inside.
What is not on this list
Alligators, sharks and snakes get the attention, and statistically none of them is what will affect your trip. The things that actually shape a Florida week are heat, rain timing, biting insects and traffic — which is a duller list, and a more useful one.
Still deciding? Ask Sunny or Hemingway — try “How do I stop getting bitten on a screened porch at dusk?”. They answer free, and neither will sell you anything.
