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Question for you all who have moved or planned to relocate your family. When visiting one of the city's you may want to live in, what are some of the things you did while visiting that city. What are some of the things you wish you would have done while visiting a possible future home?
Don't visit like you're on vacation. Stay in a decent mid-range hotel, eat in restaurants you would normally patronize, do as many normal things as possible. It's easy to fall in love with the best attributes but they typically aren't going to be part of everyday life for you.
Yeah, rent at an extended stay hotel (they have shorter term rents too, like any hotel/motel) with a kitchen. Do conventional errands like grocery shopping. I'm biased, but one of the best places to get the tenor of a city is to check out its nonprofit organizations as they're more aware of social and cultural issues and able to articulate them. By nature they're aware of their communities--and critical, you need to critically filter too--being closer to the ground.
Go to stores like a regular patron and tell employees or clerks you're thinking about moving. Talk to students at a local university. Get their feedback. If you have time or the impulse a great source of information is hospital waiting rooms!
In short, it's the people who are trying to establish a life that you want to hear from, their challenges and their hopes for the future.
Go to neighborhoods you'd want to live at and commute from there during the morning and evening rushes. Visit those areas in daytime and night time. Check out local shops, grocery stores, talk to some people in bars, etc. Visit at the time of the year you'd consider the worst weather (e.g. either hot for you, or cold for you, rainy for you, etc.)
Read the local community newspapers and listen to the local radio stations while you're visiting. You canpick up a lot about what's going on that way and have something to discuss with the locals.
We visited 7 cities prior to making a selection of our new city. We went to open houses in several of them to get a feel for how far our money would go towards our future residence. After all, it doesn't do a lot of good fallen in love with a city if you can't afford to live there. In two cities, we actually contacted realtors prior to visiting and told them we were considering moving to their city, asking if they would show us properties in our budget. They were more than happy to do so. While the internet is a good tool, there is no substitute to seeing properties in person.
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