I've been very happy here for the six years since I moved in. Walnut Trail offers nice apartments, good staff, and a very convenient location for a decent price. Gas is included in the rent, as are water/sewer/trash disposal and a Kalamazoo Gazette newspaper subscription. Electric, phone, internet, and cable/satellite TV are extra.

The complex is very large: 18 buildings, 3 stories tall, with each building containing 36 or 48 apartments. They're all spread a nice distance apart, with carefully maintained grounds in between, and lots of parking. The staff is very good about mowing & weeding in the summer and plowing & salting in the winter. The buildings are well-maintained, and residents' maintenance requests are fulfilled the next day at the latest. The office is open 7 days a week.

Their slogan ("Get away from it all - in the middle of it all!") sounds cheesy but is accurate. The complex is situated behind a store plaza, which in turn is located on a very busy avenue, but you'd never know it due to a thick buffer of trees and a curvy, walled entrance road. I hear more cicadas than I do traffic.

Within walking distance are a pond with geese, a park, and the Bicentennial Trail, which is a wooded, paved pedestrian trail that runs for 3 miles along the Portage Creek. Within walking distance the other way are Kmart, Toys R Us, Barnes & Noble, Burger King, Chili's, Walgreen's, Harding's (a large regional grocery store), several smaller shops, and a couple of neighborhoods.

Each unit has a garbage disposal, range/oven, and fridge, but no dishwasher and no washer/dryer hookup. Each building's laundry room has either 3 or 4 washer/dryers, depending on the size of the building. While every now and then I have to wait for somebody's laundry to finish, most of the time I can get mine right in. Current prices are $1.25 per wash and $1.25 per 60-minute dry.

The clubhouse and pool are centrally located, and the clubhouse can be rented out. Each building has wall mailboxes mounted in the hallway; for outgoing mail, there's a blue mailbox near the clubhouse. There's a large recycling bin in the middle of the complex, which serves its purpose well, although they could stand to empty it more often. Each building has its own dumpster.

WT's buildings were constructed in two separate batches. The first batch's buildings are multicolored, with a mixture of two- and three-prong outlets in the apartments. The second batch's buildings are brown and white, with all three-prong outlets.

If you want DSL or dial-up internet, you can pick any ISP you like. I get my DSL from JAS Networks out of Battle Creek and love it. Cable internet and cable TV are provided by Bloom, whose service is inexpensive because its TV lineup does not include any sports channels. For a lineup that does, you have to subscribe to AT&T's Dish service, which is more expensive. The satellite dishes are huge and located elsewhere on the grounds, so their signal is pretty reliable.

On the whole, I've had quiet neighbors. I did have to call a few times and have the maintenance person on duty come over and shush my very loud upstairs neighbors - who also liked to drop cigarette butts off their balcony - but they've since moved out. I live right next to the stairs, near the front door, so from my couch I can hear loud hallway conversations.

No pets are allowed, which is probably the one thing that I really, really don't like about the place.

I get a few bugs - the occasional ant, earwig, or spider - but nothing unreasonable. I do live on the ground floor, after all. A couple times a year you have to watch your step due to goose droppings.

So, to sum up...a few annoyances, which you'll get no matter where you live, but a very nice place to call home. I've been here for six years now and am satisfied.

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