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I've always lived in a relatively urban/suburban environment. I've always considered the amenities of such an environment to be a necessity. However, lately I've had this growing fascination with living in a small city or town surrounded by nature and close to a body of water. I go down rabbit holes on Google Maps exploring small towns across the U.S. I roam the streets via Street View and imagine what it'd be like to walk into town, grab a coffee at the local diner, chit chat with the town folk, and live a relatively low key life away from it all.
Has anyone else gone through a similar mindset transition? How did it go for you? Did you eventually move to a small town/city? If so, how has your life changed since that move?
Well, I am probably different because I have known since I was 18 years old that I was not suited for suburban/urban life even though I lived in suburbia from the time I was born until we moved here three years ago when I was 66 years old. Moving here was like "coming home" for me, and I don't miss ANYTHING about suburban life. A fair-sized city (pop. about 100,000) is just one hour away when our local small town (pop. about 10,000) doesn't have a service I need, but that is very rare. The beauty of nature at my doorstep MORE than makes up for any inconvenience we might experience and, again, that is very rare.
I seemed to have grown up hating suburbia/city life. Didn't matter whether the "city" was small or large. It was still a city. I was the odd sort of throwback of the family. Everyone else was content to keep feet on the pavement. I couldn't wait to get away from both suburbia and city. Including what most consider amenities. Now I live just outside a "small" city of 5000. Chalk that up to a grudging acceptance of advancing age and mortality. I choose not to be remembered as stubbornly unprepared.
I seemed to have grown up hating suburbia/city life. Didn't matter whether the "city" was small or large. It was still a city. I was the odd sort of throwback of the family. Everyone else was content to keep feet on the pavement. I couldn't wait to get away from it all...including what most consider amenities. Now I live just outside a "small" city of 5000. Chalk that up to a grudging acceptance of advancing age and mortality.
Yep, rural healtchare is definitely something to be concerned about as one gets older.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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One of the best things about this area (Puget Sound Region) is the number of places where you can be in a rural
area, small town, big city, or suburb and still be close to mountains, water, woods, and amenities. Where we are now for example in Sammamish WA there is a huge lake, 3 smaller lakes, old-growth woods, horse properties, and 2 golf courses. There are no big box stores and just a few restaurants, two supermarkets with 65,000 population. Anything we need is within 3-6 miles north or south in Issaquah or Redmond. Close enough to be convenient but far enough to avoid the traffic, noise and crime.
We are not into the "walk into town, grab a coffee" though, which would be about a mile down a steep hill and a less steep hill, then a difficult walk back up.
I've always lived in a relatively urban/suburban environment. I've always considered the amenities of such an environment to be a necessity. However, lately I've had this growing fascination with living in a small city or town surrounded by nature and close to a body of water. I go down rabbit holes on Google Maps exploring small towns across the U.S. I roam the streets via Street View and imagine what it'd be like to walk into town, grab a coffee at the local diner, chit chat with the town folk, and live a relatively low key life away from it all.
Has anyone else gone through a similar mindset transition? How did it go for you? Did you eventually move to a small town/city? If so, how has your life changed since that move?
Haha, we're the opposite. During my career, we hopped back and forth between very rural and suburbs. When I finally retired, we moved quite far from a town, and now I use Street View to walk through cities!
We're far enough away from the towns, that 5 years after building our house, Google's satellite imagery still doesn't show our house...it's shows all bare land. Same thing with Zillow; apparently uses Google maps too, and when you go to our address, it shows bare land tax assessed at 5x the surrounding bare land! Interestingly, Google Street View's images are newer than their Sat images by about year. Microsoft Bing, though, is the latest, and shows our house and barn after the house was set. Their maps are about 4 years more recent than Googles.
I went to college in a small town and liked it. I had the chance to live in a small town some years later and did so for 37 years. It was a good place to raise kids, good schools, relatively friendly. It was lacking in most of the things that we consider benefits of big city life. That includes healthcare, shopping, diversity in almost any form (restaurants, churches, ideas, people), sport teams, and public services. So it is a trade off. It depends on your priorities. I liked much of it but spent weekends in the city maybe 10 times a year.
Remember that if you have family or close friends in the city, they can’t find their way to the place where you live to visit. The highway only works in one direction taking you to them (and back home). The solution to that is to settle in a place where they want to go for vacation or at the halfway point where they can visit on the way, preferably not far off the interstate.
I grew up in the suburbs and could not wait to escape. I always wanted a farm. I never got one but I worked on a few, and lived as far away from pavement as I could. Now in my retirement, I finally have my farm, but I'm too old to farm it. I have a horse, some milk goats and some chickens, a big garden. It's enough. It's six miles to the tiny village where I could get that cup of bad American coffee, and a half hour on back roads to a college town of 30,000. That's about right.
Retirement Thread I mainly Post, suggestions, rent for 6 months in a small town, rural area.
Moved to the Olympic Peninsula, 30 years ago, grew up in the San Francisco-Bay Area.
Husband disabled, fortunate o have excellent health care till he died, 2012.
Major shopping an hour, if the Hood Canal bridge is open, usually is. No department stores, one movie house, 20 minutes away. Costco (Warehouse store), Home Depot.
Lots of outdoors; people meet where their interests are i.e. local threatre, church, garden club.
Learned to be content where I'm; travel to the big shopping area, want to flee back to my small town. Oh! Seattle, 2 hours away, almost major event if one likes to travel
I too am digging the Olympic Peninsula.
Our place is nice.
There is a lot to like up here and for us the plus’s outweigh the minus’s.
We are really only hip about the Peninsula because Seattle takes a couple hours to get to.
I think it actually took us 3 years to visit it the first time, but I didn’t move up here to be near another “City”.
We often drove our suburban filled with scuba gear to Vancouver Island to visit family.
Driving up here I often daydreamed about living up here with no responsibilities or traffic and now I am.
My wife is still an executive for a Silicon Valley company.
She enjoys WFH with her water view up here and gets flown down there for meetings/office get togethers every now and then.
My career was mainly spent in San Francisco (The City) and I lived 32 miles east of there.
That 32 miles could be very taxing on you when traffic was bad.
Between the ever increasing heat and that hellacious traffic it was just time to leave.
I don’t feel bad about leaving one bit.
For now I’m just going to keep the Bay Area place as a second home/investment property or something like that.
So yeah, leaving The City was indeed “all that” for the wife and I.
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