You won't find anything as active as the Villages up North, but we looked very carefully at Fairfield Glade in Crossville, TN before we finally decided on the Villages. You can have a real house with a hobby barn on an acre lot, if you want. The golf courses are nicer, bigger, and even cheaper than our executive courses, when you consider the higher cost of our amenity fees. And then you've got all the lakes just to the east, if you're into boating and fishing. If you want to actually live on the lake, check out Lake Tansi retirement village, also in Crossville, or Tellico Village, near Knoxville.
We also looked a lot around Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri (but its not a retirement village -- just cool summers).
The way I found places to check out was
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