A consumption market that always needs trucks coming in.

It is a matter of what the state produces versus what it consumes. Florida's population and its construction and tourism economies pull in enormous volumes of retail goods, building materials and equipment, while the state exports comparatively little manufactured freight back out. The peninsula geography compounds it: there is no through-traffic, because nothing passes through Florida on the way to somewhere else. The practical effect for a driver is that finding a load into Florida is rarely the hard part. Finding the load back out, at a rate worth running, is the skill — and it is the part a dispatcher should be solving before you ever take the inbound.

Yes to both. Produce out of South Florida and the growing regions has a defined season, the winter population swell changes consumer freight patterns, and storm season shifts building-material flows in ways that are hard to forecast far ahead. None of that makes or breaks a year, but it does mean the market you learn in March is not the market you run in September. Drivers who do well here treat the calendar as part of lane planning rather than a surprise, and they keep more than one type of freight in reach so a soft season in one does not empty the week.

Far enough that you do not have to leave the Southeast to stay busy. Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee all sit within a day or two of most Florida metros, which makes a regional loop out and back genuinely plannable. The longer the peninsula run, though, the more the geography costs you: a load originating in Miami spends most of a day getting to the state line. Drivers based nearer the I-10 and I-75 junctions in North Florida trade a thinner local market for a much shorter reach to everywhere else, and that trade is worth doing the arithmetic on before you pick a home base.