Can you stand the heat?

    Climate is a major criterion for choosing a home on the course.  Except for those lucky individuals with oceanfront property in Florida, the Sunshine State's flat, often boring topography is certainly not an attraction.  Frankly, Arizona provides more diversity of views than does Florida (again, except for those on or near the beach).  Real estate agents in the Carolinas report more and more people from Florida are buying property in the Blue Ridge mountains, and their chief complaint about Florida is the heat in the summer (and the traffic and, for those at the coast, the bump up in insurance premiums).  These "bounce backs," who moved originally from north to south, are now content to generate their own winter warmth with a sweater or jacket.

    If you are planning to live in just one place in retirement, it makes good sense to spend a few experimental weeks in your preferred location during the dog days of summer.  Play golf at all times of the day as an experiment to see if you can stand the heat.  Determine if your intended course opens for play early enough in the morning so that you can complete your round by 11.  The nice thing about taking the temperature of the lifestyle in a hot weather climate in summer is that rentals are abundant and cheap.

    Be mindful that it is not just about the heat but rather the combination of heat and humidity, or the Temperature Humidity Index (THI).  Residents of the desert southwest are fond of saying, "Yeah, it's hot, but it's a dry heat."  Residents of Florida can make no such claim but, on the other hand, you can almost set your clock by the afternoon summer thunderstorms that cool down temperatures, at least for a while. 

    Weather.com has a decent function to compare high and low temperatures between two cities on a month by month basis (although when we tried it earlier, it did not work).  We have yet to find a site with a good comparison of THI, but we'll keep looking and hope if one of our faithful readers knows of one, they will leave a comment here.

 

 

 

     

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