I'm in my early 50's and my wife and I lived on maui for 10 years, we had a great place we'd been renting for all that time up on Haleakala... but I bailed on it because I wanted to "own" a house and Maui was just insane as far as realestate goes. So we bought a beautiful place on the Olympic Pennisula -- ski chalet type home on a hillside overlooking a valley... was was supposed to only get 29 inches of rain a year because it's every so slightly in the rain shadow of the olympics. But I found, now, too late, that 29 inches of "rain" in this part of the world is very very different from 29 inches of rain on Maui. It "never" snows here... but last two winters have seen record snowfall. Anyway, long story short, I have to get the heck out of here in winter so I joined this forum hoping to find leads on how to get set up on a "snowbird" type gig where I spent 7 months in Washington and 5 months in Sarasota (my wifes family lives there). I did some searches on the web for "Snowbird" "florida" and came up with a ton of cheezy looking websites... so I thought maybe I'd find something in here. I'm not retiring for quite a while but I've owned my own consulting business for 18 years and we can live wherever we want, whenever we want for as long as we want so we're trying to take advantage of htat. anyway, nice to meet you all, hope to come up with some resources in here. If anyone needs any advice on Maui, I'm your guy.