A longing that grows daily

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Dances with WYo

I was hoping someone would say that, Florida summers suck! We do miss the Alligators though.

ProTip: The Dark Orange type color here is nearly unreadable on some screens. I know you were trying to say something back there, but i'm not entirely sure what it was. Something about sweat, perhaps?

Earlier I was poking a little fun at the old maxim that everyone knows, "It ain't the heat, it's the humidity," by pointing at different places on the Big Island that have virtually the same humidity as each other, all year long, but have very different feels at different times.

That's because it IS the heat + the humidity + the airflow that goes into our perception of comfort. One thing that makes a big difference between Hawai'i and Florida is that Hawai'i rarely gets really hot, and with a nice breeze it feels cooler. The subjective difference between 80 F at 80% humidity and 90 F at 90% humidity can be enormous.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by Dances with WYo

From experience, you will NOT LIKE FLORIDA AT ALL, if you don't like the very short humid time you have in Minnesota. It is truly miserable from early June through October. I hate it and ONLY lived there because of my SO. You walk outside and you just start sweating. My poor horses were covered with sweat all day during the summers. It's brutal, and I'm not exaggerating. If you can afford to live by the beach you will get 'some' breezes that will help make it more bearable but not inland at all. 95 degrees with 90% humidity is suffocating. The winters on the other hand are glorious! Can you be a snowbird?

I've visited Florida 6 times, but only in the winters. I kind of expect the summertime to be miserable in Florida, just as you describe. It's tough to convince my wife, who might need a reality check putting up with Florida in the middle of the summer for a week or two. If we retired in Florida, we would probably have to be snowbirds, since the summers are so miserable there. We would have to be away from Minnesota six months, plus one day to avoid the Minnesota income taxes on our retirement income. Owning and maintaining two homes is expensive and a hassle. We could do that, but it's more of a question do we want to do that rather than can we afford to do that.

Originally Posted by Dances with WYo

I was actually thinking, no pun intended, that Hawaii could be a 'paradise' weather wise and it does sound very close to being that. Maybe living in the higher elevations to get the cooler weather and going down to the coast for the water/warmth etc (I'm a scuba diver). We wouldn't considering moving until we were debt free with some $$ in reserve.

Living debt free and saving more money is a very wise thing to do, no matter where you live, although especially before moving to Hawaii. Living below or well below your means at an above average income job is the way to build your net worth, which can give you the freedom to retire anywhere you want retire.

[imagtek]

Being in love with your fantasy of what a place would be like, and the actual reality of the place, are two totally different things. If you have never been to Hawaii trust me, you have no idea what it is like here. I don't mean that in a bad way but you are insane if you come out here to live on a one way ticket without visiting and getting a feel for it.

[Kayekaye]

Originally Posted by davephan

I hate the high humidity. We usually get about 30 days during the summertime when the temperatures are above 80 and the dewpoint is above 70 in Minnesota. When it gets that hot, humid, and sticky, we can't do much outside and we have to hunker down inside in the central AC. That makes our short summers even shorter.

This is so true, usually August is just brutal heat and humidity in MN. So we decided if we were going to entertain moving to Hawaii we would go for the month of August to see how it compared and if we could stand it. We rented an apartment at Turtle Bay Kuilima on the north shore for a month. We were steeled expecting the worse, rain forest, jungle visions exploding in our minds.

But it was wonderful compared to a MN August even though the people all said it was a heat wave, and kept apologizing that we had to endure it. We just laughed to ourselves, it was nothing of the kind to us.

(I must admit the loft in the top of the second floor of the apartment was really hot, they need to have some vents or dormer windows to get the air moving up there, but we slept downstairs.)

[hotzcatz]

I guess most of our weather is sort of relative. This time of year we get snowbirders coming over from the mainland happy as a lark, running about in shorts and tee shirts while the rest of us are bundled up freezing our okoles off. It gets down below sixty and those folks don't even put on long shorts or a sweater!

[Fredesch]

It's relative, ice cream sales go up when it warms up, even if warming up is just getting to 50. Likewise, I it was a beautiful day outside today in Virginia because yesterday it was mixed rain and snow...