Nice place, DeepPurple. When I did my retirement location study in that thread a while back, Florida ranked pretty high for me. My wife has given it the spousal veto due to humidity, but if I was the king I'd definitely consider it as an eventual retirement location.
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No humidity, I guess you're going to Arizona. I've never been there, but I grew up 100 miles from here in St. Petersburg, so I knew Florida would be my final location. I'm away from the water, which makes it nicer during hurricane season, but it's only a 90 minute drive to the Gulf beaches if I want to go. We are one hour from Orlando and an hour and half from Tampa. It's a good central location and we are at the intersection of I-75 and the Florida Turnpike, which makes everywhere accessible.

When I lived up in Maryland, I found half of the days in August it would hit 100, it never goes above 95 here. Humidity, isn't that what air conditioning is for? Come January when it's bitter cold in most places, we're about 70 degrees, if it goes down to 50 then that's really cold.

The Villages is still the fastest growing area in America, they sell about 200 new homes a month. Unfortunately all the homes are across the Florida Turnpike, they had to built three golf cart bridges for everyone to get from the new area to the established areas. This bridge crosses SR 44. The established area is 35 square miles and 2020 census was 127,000 people.





My golf cart, 2011 Yamaha I bought new. I think we'll go to McDonalds for lunch and get an Egg McMuffin.


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^^^

You're living the life of Riley and deservedly so, good for you.
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The Stanley Hotel under the backdrop of forest fire smoke.


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Well, shit. Looks like a lot of Estes is getting evacuated. Hope you're well.
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Mandatory evacuation called around noon. Holy crap, coming down that mountain was a surreal experience. You have to be able to see smoke cloud, it was like driving into the night.
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Yeah, we've been able to see it more days than not lately. You good? Let me [know if (weird autocorrect there)] you're stranded without a place to stay.
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Boom.
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Oh yeah, we're in a nice suite up in Wyoming now, all good. Appreciate that though...seriously.
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Very cool... any strange experiences up there?
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Did a tour of the place a few years back and there's definitely a creepy vibe in certain areas, but never stayed there, and probably never will.
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I love storms. This was 2 years and 2 weeks ago, just east of where I live. Pretty sizable rotation in the rear with a massive powerful downdraft in front of it.
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Here's a couple of photos of a shelf cloud as a strong storm rolled through. The first photo is of the cloud itself. The 2nd is a closeup of the front edge, where the wind gusts were strong enough to create a debris cloud.
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That first one is pretty scary. I hope you survived.

We don't really see big storm fronts in Denver. The mountains are to our west and they tend to disrupt things. While approaching storms are sometimes scary looking, they were interesting to see when I was growing up in the Midwest.
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