Things To Do In SW Florida

Since 2010, Groveland has nearly tripled in population. Located along Florida’s Turnpike a short drive west of Orlando, it’s easily one of the fastest-growing cities in Florida.

With so many large housing developments cropping up there, the city is striving to preserve a traditional urban development pattern and historic architectural style. It’s also trying to encourage infill construction to help revitalize its central core, according to a report in GrowthSpotter.

To help accomplish those goals, the city in southern Lake County is making available to developers a portfolio of pre-approved architectural plans for homes that are designed in a New Urbanist style. City officials hope that the ease of using these designs will attract smaller developers in an area where most homes are built by big developers.

“We decided, instead of you having to come up with new building plans from scratch, let’s just put a few plans on the shelf that have already been reviewed for our architectural and building code,” said Timothy Maslow, Groveland’s community development director. “If you want to do this off the shelf, you’re going to meet the code. You’ll save time and money.” read more

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio who spent an unexpected 371 days in space setting an American record made it back to Earth safely landing in a Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday with two Russian cosmonauts.

Rubio flew up with his ISS comrades Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin of Roscosmos back on Sept. 21, 2022, and they were slated to return six months ago, but soon after docking with the International Space Station, their Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft suffered damage from what officials determined to be a micometeorite strike.

It damaged the coolant system so the spacecraft was returned to Earth minus its crew, who had to wait aboard the ISS for both their replacement ride and for a new Soyuz to be prepped for their replacement crew who arrived to the ISS earlier this month.

They climbed aboard the Soyuz MS-23 early Wednesday undocking at 3:54 a.m. and touched down at 7:17 a.m. EDT on the grassy steppes of Kazakhstan.

“It’s good to be home,” Rubio said while being attended to by recovery teams, giving smiles and thumbs up signs. read more