Vacations in Florida are very relaxing.
You feel the hot sun on you, a warm breeze blowing on you and you remember how cold it was where you escaped from.
Just knowing that you managed to put one over on the weatherman is very relaxing indeed! When you need to get away from it all, choose a small town away from the big cities, the attractions and the commercialization because getting away from the fast pace of home is more likely than visiting a place like Orlando or Miami.
When I moved to Florida, I chose the little town of Beverly Hills, where the population that is rapidly approaching 10,000 is not evident from the quiet park or the library.
  Originally designed as a retirement community back in the 1950's, Beverly Hills has made a lot of demographic changes as generation after generation moved here to escape the fast pace of home! One of the initial draws to Beverly Hills was the advertising efforts of the developers who sold cookie cutter homes.
  As they sold more homes, they started adding new designs as competition began growing among the construction companies.
Now the new developments are outside the Beverly Hills city limits, but the new population comes from people who came to see the new developments, but found homes more in their price range in the older developments.
Because Beverly Hills is a retirement community, golf courses abound within a 5 mile radius.
If you enjoy playing golf, you have many options, all professionally maintained and ready for you.
  Early morning tee times have to be scheduled, but the rest of the day is usually wide open as the sun makes it much harder to play a relaxing round when it is draining your strength.
One drawback to vacationing in Beverly Hills, however, is the lack of hotels.
  The Beverly Hills Hotel is the only game in town, and it has been around since the early days of the town itself! Once the place where the developers would put you up while you checked out their houses for sale and they made you an offer you couldn't refuse.
It is definitely a much older choice, but the price is very good (under $100 per night) and they give you a choice of smoking (rooms really smell like freshly smoked tobacco) or non-smoking.
But the rooms are more like villas than a hotel room.
If you can live without having everything looking like it was newly constructed, the Beverly Hills Hotel is a nice place to relax while you are exploring the town.
They have an attached restaurant, The Village Inn, that makes home cooking something you don't have to do a few nights a week...
They serve up home style favorites and on Friday nights have an all you can eat fish fry that will get you totally stuffed.
  The waitresses and cooks have been there for years, and the locals all come and eat on a regular basis, because it is nice to have someone else do the cooking! You can also find hotels a little further away from Beverly Hills, including the Citrus Hills Lodge in Hernando, and a host of hotels in Inverness and Crystal River.
Since I live here in Beverly Hills, I can't tell you about stays in any of the hotels outside of Beverly Hills, but I did stay 3 nights in the Beverly Hills Hotel while I was waiting for my apartment to be ready.
I recommend visiting Beverly Hills if you are into golf, bingo or just want to stay somewhere that doesn't have Mickey Mouse stamped all over everything...
you can get to everything in minutes, if you even want to go anywhere.
  Or, you can spend the day out in the sun and bake yourself to a relaxed perfection without worrying about having to be anywhere or how much it is going to cost you.
When you come visit, make sure you let me know, I can show you around!