Check it out: I talk with my friend Nancy Miller and photo editor Zana Woods about the story I edited in the October issue of Wired, The Slow and the Furious.
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It's a brutally hot morning here at the Villages, one of the biggest retirement communities on the planet. But the saunalike central Florida weather doesn't slow down the 77,000 seniors who call this place home.
On the nine softball fields around the development, smack-talking eightysomethings try to leg out a base hit. Graceful swimmers slice through the water in glittering pools. Near the Bait Shop bar in one of the immaculate town squares, line dancers shimmy in unison.
Villagers play hard. And they drive ... well, they drive kinda slow. Because the ride of choice at the Villages isn't a Lincoln or a Cadillac. It's a golf cart.
The diminutive vehicles are the primary mode of transportation for daily life here. Residents can drive them just about everywhere they need to go. They whiz along 87 miles of trails, from the Walmart to the town squares, from the hospital to the archery range. When they have to cross the six-lane US 27/US 441 highway, no sweat—they take the specially built golf cart overpass. "We don't like to call them our golf carts," a retiree named Warren Cromer tells me. "They're our second car."