Florida trip!

Surprise! Last week I sneaked away for a quick trip to the visit the fam in Florida and finally got around to testing out the feature that schedules posts on this here blog thingy so that you all would still be entertained.

No, that’s not the fam, though sometimes they name their cows after family members. My Aunt, Uncle, Dziadzi and Great Aunt all live together in a rural part of central Florida, with cows, dogs and a cat. My cousin and her kids all live down there too and we try to get down there at least once a year to visit everyone and explore a 1-2 hour radius around the area.

This year we stayed at The Villiages, the biggest retirement community I’ve ever vacationed in. It’s seriously big, when they finish building it will have almost twice as many houses as York city has residents. There are two SuperWalmarts in it.

If you’ve never vacationed in a retirement community, you should try it. The Villiages has a couple of town squares with main streets lined with shops and restaurants. The town square has live outdoor entertainment every night and drink stands with happy hour specials on every corner of the square. These old people know how to live it up.Why aren’t all communities planned this way?

This is town square. They pull the stacked lawn chairs out during the performances.

This is the main street.

Notice the the golf carts in the pictures? Yeah. The retirees all drive around in golf carts. And they take “cruising” around in their carts very seriously. You should see some of the tricked out golf carts. I didn’t have my camera with me at night when they all came out, but some are covered in football team peripheral or modeled after old time cars that can cost upwards of $20K.

As fun as it was, we didn’t stay in the retirement community the entire time.

We rented a boat and went swimming in Homosassa Springs.

The Floridians complained it was cold, but us Northerners thought it was perfect.

Except for the alligators…

Which are a legitimate worry.

I was really slacking on the picture taking though. I also didn’t capture any of our kayaking adventure where we kept thinking we saw alligator eyes peaking out of the water but eventually figured out they were turtle heads.

Overall it was a super fun trip and am looking forward to planning the next one. The fam is looking forward to it too. They say the only time they do fun stuff is when we come to visit