Many Minnesotans who have homes in Florida escaped the worst of the damage from the recent hurricane on the southeast coast.

Hurricane Milton, which made landfall on Wednesday, killed at least ten people. The storm, expected to be a Category 5, weakened to a Category 3 but had sustained winds of 120 mph. According to the Associated Press, it reached Florida just a week after Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 230 people in several states.

A large group of Minnesota snowbirds that live in Naples, Florida – about two hours south of Sarasota, where the hurricane made a direct approach – did not experience as much destruction as storms of previous years, said Mike Schumann, who is based in St. Louis Park lives in Minnesota during the warm months. Florida has long lured Minnesotans with its warm winters and spring baseball training, as the Minnesota Twins practice in Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast, about a 45-minute drive from Naples.

When Schumann took a long-planned trip to Germany during the storm, his home and furniture store in Naples were at the forefront of his mind. Schumann streamed a local news channel in Naples and received updates from his neighbors who decided to hide and weather the storm.

“We were at full speed all night,” he said the day after the storm. “My neighbors were kind of crazy trying to get through this. But based on the pictures they sent us of our home, it wasn’t that bad.”

Schumann, returning from his trip to Minnesota, said he would wait until power was back on and hurricane relief efforts had subsided before heading out to check the condition of his properties.

“We were really lucky,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was going to be a lot worse than it was.”

Naples, once described as “warm Edina,” has such a large Minnesota population that Minnesotans formed a weekly winter breakfast club in the 1960s that still meets with Minnesota politicians and CEOs.