I have received some negative mail about the following information. And my wife says that in all fairness, I should mention that I am a late riser and still blessed with good hearing. Also, my experience was living beside the South golf course, so I don't know just how much of this applies to the other courses. It all seems to depend on the location of your house. Here are my views! Take them for what they're worth...

Sun City Center is considered a golfing community. Much of the open space is golf courses. The marketing by the developer stresses the number of courses and the combined number of holes. In your pre-retirement life, you may have thought that living beside a golf course would be a wonderful way to live out your golden years. Been there, done that...and it isn't!

The difference between playing on a golf course and living beside it is like the difference between eating at a gourmet restaurant and living across the alley from their garbage cans.

When you've played on beautifully manicured greens and fairways, did you ever think about when that manicuring took place? Try, shortly after 6 AM! It's still dark and those #@%*!&s are out with their headlights mowing the greens, morning-after-morning-after-morning for the rest of your life. Once the greens have been groomed, then the mowing of the fairways commences. Large farm tractors pull mowers back-and-forth. If the noise doesn't get to you, then the diesel fumes will. And if the tractors aren't mowing or aerating the ground, then they're spreading chemicals. My, what a glorious time to live along a golf course...

And to go with the tractor noise is the noise from the public address speakers attached to the clubhouse. Starting promptly around 7:20 AM, they blare forth annoucements. And the volume is turned-up for the benefit of the golfer that is the most hard of hearing (and in a retirement community, that's pretty loud). We lived over a quarter-of-a-mile from the clubhouse and I could make out the name of every person who was to play.

And if the tractors aren't out, then the golfers are. Every few minutes another group plays by your home. Depending on how well they hit the ball, they either yell about their success or else yell some very naughty words. All day long...day-in and day-out... living beside a golf course quickly loses its charm. And it is quite startling to be sitting in your home and to look up and see people walking by your windows, as they tromp through your flower beds looking for a lost ball. We even had one jerk play his ball off of our lawn back onto the fairway. Of course he made a divot which he ignored. I had to yell at him to come back and replace it. The worst day for trespassing is when a company has rented the course for an employee golf outing. Those people are such lousy shots, that no one is safe outside their home.

And then there's the trash. I never realized just how much coffee golfers drink from foam cups or how much chewing gum, crackers and candy bars they consumed, until I cleaned up their cups and wrappers from around my home.

Many of the new homes in Sun City Center are being built beside golf courses. Do not depend on or trust the real estate brokers or agents to tell you that none of the above will affect your property. If they say it won't, just try getting them to put it in writing... Remember, they work for the seller - not for you! Do your own research. If the course already exists, get out there at 6 AM and sit in a chair for several hours to get a sense of what it will be like to live beside a golf course for the rest of your golden years. If the course does not yet exist (like on the South side), ask to see - and get it in writing - where the clubhouse, loud-speakers, trails, restroom stops and greens are going to be in relation to your home. If they are unwilling to provide this information, beware, beware!

Needless to say, we lived beside a golf course here for two years before selling our home to a golfer and moving to a cul-de-sac on a lake. My, my, what a difference!