As a Canadian Snowbird you really want to consider the overall historical weather pattern of where you hope to spend time escaping from Canadian winters.
It isn’t enough to know that the average mean temperature in January in the destination of choice is 14 degrees C (or around 63 deg F). You want to know more about the overall weather in the area over the entire winter months as averages mean that sometimes the temperature will be quite a bit higher than that average, but then, as often the temperatures will be quite a bit lower.
Quite a bit lower than 14 C (63 F) will mean that it will be downright cold. You want to escape cold, right?
Let us give you an example.
Some years ago we took advantage of friend’s long-term, snowbird rental near Mobile, Alabama. They were enjoying their stay very much, and invited us to go down and sample the lifestyle there, as they knew that we desired to be out of Canada for the winter.
They rented a beautiful stilt home on Dauphin Island, Alabama, right on the Gulf coast, for their winter stay. The image below is of a row of stilt homes you pass by on your way to the bridge to Dauphin Island.
So we spent part of winter on beautiful Dauphin Island, smack in the upper Gulf of Mexico waters off the coast of Alabama. It is a nice island for sure, and the barbeque there is wonderful, but it wasn’t the best long-term Snowbird destination for us.
If the average daily temperature in Dauphin Island in January 50 F (10 deg. C) for example, to get that average, there must be many days with temperatures above that 50 F (10 deg. C) and, unfortunately, equally as many below that level. That means that there will be very cold days during your stay, for sure.
For us not only was the weather quite cool, and yes, sometimes cold, during our stay, on top of that the winds roaring in off the Gulf rattled the fillings in our teeth every night, and tornadoes were spawned almost nightly all along the coast during out stay. If you like coolish winter weather, and storm watching, then overwintering on Dauphin Island may be right for you.
When we select our destination for overwintering now, we’re looking for places where the winter time average daily temperature is as high as possible to ensure that when we get the cooler average temperatures it’s still warm enough for us. What is your cold weather threshold?
We also remember that when we go on a vacation to a warm place for one week or two, a number of days of bad weather during that short span of holiday can spell disaster for the holiday.
On the other hand, if you are staying somewhere where winter isn’t for a number of months, and you get a week total of lousy weather, the impact of a few days too cold, wet weather on a stay measuring in 100 days or more is almost inconsequential. It’s only of the weather at our snowbird destination is cold for prolonged stretches that we feel we’ve made a mistake in picking this place as our snowbird getaway.
The historical weather patterns for our prospective Snowbird destination is and will be the first criteria of choice for us.