I made it back from my vacation in FL late last night. It was about 84 yesterday in FL and right now the wind chill is -10 in Chicago. Fun.
The trip was wonderful and it was great to see my parents and their new community. They are living in one of these ultra-planned retirement communities in central FL. They have almost 100,000 residents and more moving in every day and it's pretty impressive how the place is scaling.
I joked with Alison that it's Disney World for old people, but it's sort of true. In the development, there are two "themed" town squares. One is a Spanish city and the other is a lakefront town (think Lake Geneva, WI). The Spanish one has a spanish-style cathedral and everything. There's live music in both squares every night, litle festivals, and lots of little stores and restaurants in each square.
All of the houses are organized in villages - there are like 50 of them so far. And each little village has a swimming pool and facilities for bocce, shuffleboard, etc. And then there are themed "regional" centers for sets of villages that have pool tables, computers, tennis, etc. It's all pretty cool.
Visiting them felt sort of like a seinfeld episode though. There was the obligatory shuffleboard playing and such and their development might as well have been called del boca vista :) It was really nice though and I was able to go for a run and swim a bit outdoors (until I got kicked out of the pool for being "underage" - apparently you have to be 30 to swim there).
All in all a great trip and good to see them. And as you saw in my last post, Disney with Alison was also a major highlight!