When I moved to New England I discovered that a substantial segment of the horse-owning population who could afford it moved wholesale to Florida, and also South Carolina, for the winter – with their horses of course. Equine shipping companies exist to ferry them back and forth. There is a winter show season down there as there is a summer show season up here, and rafts of winter boarding/training facilities.
Riding in snow has its limitations.
We drive down I-95 to Florida periodically (we live in the mid-Atlantic area, and as noted the parents live in southern Florida). We see a LOT of vehicles with Canadian license plates along the way.
Interestingly, most of them are from Quebec, versus Ontario or any of the other eastern provinces. That could just be because I tend to notice Quebec plates more than the others, but I do think there’s a skew toward Quebec vs the others.
At least in my part of greater Miami / Southeast metro FL, Quebec plates outnumber all other Canadian plates put together.
Less mileage on those big-ass Canadian RVs.
Exactly
Exactly. The largest city in Canada is Toronto. 12 of the top 20 are in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland and Labrador.
Florida is much closer to there than any of the other states mentioned. There is excellent road access (if you consider I-95 “excellent”). So if you’re driving, it’s a decent option.
There are certainly other places in the South that are not THAT much further, but Florida is certainly the closest that has a tropical or near-tropical climate, and other places don’t have as much of a reputation for being retiree-friendly.
If I was forced to live in California, this is where I would go.
I snuck Tequila into Disneyland in a clear water bottle. Brought a whole new experience into The Happiest Place On Earth!
Sure, Hiaasen laments the destruction of the Florida environment by greedy developers and crooked politicians. But he also makes me believe that there are still a (very) few places left worth seeing or even living in. I’ve visited Key West nearly ever year for the last several years, thanks to a wealthy friend with properties there. If I were to live in Florida, it would have to be in the Keys. I love the water, boating, fishing etc . but don’t know if I could take it in the summer months. In the not too distant past I stayed in Pine Island and had a few beers in Matlacha. It crossed my mind at the time how vulnerable those places were. As for the rest of the state, you can have it.
And then, there’s this.
There is plenty of competition.
Absolutely. I know many people who’ve headed to places like that for extended periods in winter.
However, for people in the eastern part of the country, which is where most Canadians are, Florida is much more conveniently gotten to. It also has, of course, beaches and ocean and all the activities made possible by them, things Arizona and New Mexico are notably deficient in.
Apropos of nothing specific, last weekend I was in Montréal, where I spotted a car with a Florida plate.
This is pretty common in Canada.
Our neighbors were both schoolteachers who retired early, and for years they had a big-ass RV that they drove to Arizona for the four coldest months of the year.
From Edmonton, Arizona is a 2-3 day drive, depending on how hard you push. Miami is 4850 kilometers. Arizona is half the distance. Driving an RV to Florida would cost a fortune and take a week.
Most snowbirds in Western Canada seem to choose Arizona, New Mexico, or Costa Rica if they are flying. Why not California? Cost of living. Taxes are crazy, housing is crazier, state sales taxes, gas prices, congested roads… I personally have never liked California. We have been to Florida twice, and loved it so much we thought of buying a place there. But that was before the big real estate boom. It was amazing back then how cheap Florida was compared to Canada.
I keep thinking I should bump this thread in the dead of winter, so I will. High temperatures in the sixties and seventies all week. Brrr!
We do get brief cold snaps, but I think I’d die if it was cold for three months straight.
Happily 79F here at 10am in South Florida. Nothing perplexing about the appeal of that to me. Not at all.
I’m more than willing to take true winter weather, in exchange for year-round fewer insects.
I live about 3 blocks from the beach. I experience zero insects. I own no insect repellent. I’m sure there are some crawling around in the bushes. But that’s the extent of my insect “problem.”
Now were I to move into a swamp I’d have a different problem, or rather problems. Gator-, snake-, and insect problems. So I don’t do that.
Well, other than mosquitos. They’re really bad in Minnesota and Michigan.
I have been there.
The beach was nice. If I was there for a week in midwinter, the warm temperatures were nice.
I couldn’t breathe in the grocery store, it reeked of pesticides – not just the pesticide aisle, which was humungous, but the whole store. (We are going to live in a place swarming with year-round insect life and we’re just going to try to KILL THEM ALL! – no, it wasn’t working.) I couldn’t breathe anywhere in the summer, it was too hot and humid. Even in the winter – I felt like I could never quite wake up. Restful for a week’s vacation. Not a way I want to live.
The neighborhood my parents lived in for a while was OK; though my mother hated Florida and moved back north as soon as she could manage it after my father died. The neighborhood my uncle-outlaw lived in, in Miami Beach, was fascinating and a lot of fun; though I’m not a city person and wouldn’t want to live there full time. The “neighborhood” my aunt and uncle lived in, a gated community in an area absolutely full of other gated communities broken only by an occasional shopping center, I found terrifying and stifling; partly because of all the walls, partly because there was nothing but a repetition of the same exact stuff over and over, partly because there was nothing remotely natural (manicured lawn, bedding plants that were clearly left just as long as they were blooming and then changed out, the ducks on the creek turned out to be decoys – I suspect the water was so poisoned by lawn pesticides that nothing could live there); and most of all because everybody living in the complex was white and everybody doing the cleaning and taking care of the grounds was Black and what the hell are you people doing here to accomplish that?
I wanted to go to what was advertised as a farmers’ market, but there weren’t any farmers, only resellers. What was for sale was supermarket leftovers still with the supermarket price tags stuck to them.
– I think the attraction, at least for older people, is partly ‘hey, it’s warm, and we don’t have to shovel snow’ and partly that some areas develop enough snowbirds who winter in the same places in Florida every year that they kind of take their community with them; and for younger people at least partly being able to hang out on the beach in warm weather no matter the time of year.
And then, of course, some people like it hot. I remember walking back from the beach to my parents’ house, three blocks, one day that was in the upper 90’s – I liked the beach, I could stand my parents’ house in the airconditioning, I could just about manage a three block walk on pavement. I stopped to talk to a neighbor who was out doing something in his driveway; after about five minutes standing on hot black pavement I said I had to move on before I got heatstroke. He said, ‘I used to live where it got over 120º[F] all the time, I like it like this.’
– there must also be some people who loved the old Florida, and there must be some of it left; though I never managed to see any of it. A lot of it’s been built over by now.
Yeah, my parents retired to AZ, and while it is a dry heat 
when it’s over 110 during the day and down to 93 at 3:00 am, it’s too damn hot for me.
I had to visit once in August, and I didn’t spend any time outdoors other than going from a/c house to a/c car to a/c shopping center/restaurant.
It was awful.