Retire In Coastal N.C.

[Toria]

Originally Posted by marc515

Dsobotta,

Have always found your posts interesting. You somehow manage to always keep things in perspective. Keep posting, and providing your valuable insight!

marc

I have been enjoying them too, as well as his beautiful photos!

[Doug Terhune]

Have you looked into Calabash, NC yet?

[LLN]

A lot and I mean a lot of retirees like NEW BERN. We have a pretty good hospital, and are 45 minutes from the teaching hospital at Greenville. We are 45 minutes from the coast and have a diverse number of activities. The library is downtown and used heavily, and there is a YMCA in town, too. Theater, art, and other stuff to do weekly.

You will have to deal with heat and humidity. Just remember even a $400 electric bill in summer is only a little over 50 cents an hour to stay cool, have lights, ice, etc. More than pays for the location. $400 is extreme but not unheard of if you go the historic (read -- non-insulated) route.

Yeah, New Bern does have very high electric due some really bad decisions on providing electric service, many years ago.

Good luck.

lln

[xnyer]

Originally Posted by dsobotta

As someone who was born in NC and has lived from the mountains to the coast and all the way up to eastern Canada. I think I can offer a perspective on heat and humidity that comes from experience not conjecture.

Growing up in the fifties just west of Winston-Salem, we did not even have an air condition until I was 12 or 13, and then it was just for one room. We did fine, Sundays under the shade tree were pretty special, but it is the south and it does get hot. Heat was just part of life. Heat pumps and central air changed all that.

Eventually after college in the NE, we ended up in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. While Nova Scotia never really got hot, New Brunswick could get very warm and very cold. Just before we moved back to the states in 1987, our house in Halifax did not have an air conditioner and certainly did not need one except for one or two days a year.

We moved to Columbia, MD and it was close to climate shock. Maryland and DC are very warm, humid, and lacking in breezes. We spent a lot of time in the house until we got used to the weather.

After a couple of years there we moved to the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Va. There on the mountain we found plenty of breezes and sometimes they run around 50-60 mph. It is less humid than the DC area, but still warm. We just left there a few days ago, and it is not a good place to escape snow this winter.

We lived in Roanoke twenty years and also had a home in Mt. Airy, NC in the foothills below the Blueridge Parkway, and in 2006 got a home on the NC coast hear Cape Carteret.

We are 2.5 hours from Raleigh, about 45 minutes from New Bern, and 90 minutes from Wilmington. I have been going to the Northern Outer Banks for over 50 years. I love them, but I would rather live where I am.

We live on the shores of the White Oak River about ten minutes by boat from the Intracoastal Waterway and ten minutes by car from the beaches of Emerald Isle.

I have found the climate here more temperate than the other places I lived in North Carolina or Virginia. It is warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. There is a period in the summer, sometimes six weeks and other years longer that it does get hot. However, it does not get as hot and humid as it does in interior NC or in South Carolina. Check the climate records and you will see that what I say is correct. I am a weather junkie.

Our home here on the coast is on the water. We get near continuous breezes but are sheltered from storms. Our house has one side with lots of windows facing the south. It is a very pleasant place to live. The pansies that are thriving by our garage door are a testament to the nice climate.

We have very few flying insects, and in spite of qualifying for a senior discount I have managed to mow my yard with a walk behind mower all through the summer for the last three years.

Some of the things you learn to do are keep your air conditioner set on 78, otherwise you feel like you are walking into a meat locker when you come inside. Wear light, loose fitting clothes, and when it gets really hot, go jump in the ocean. There are some days when it is too hot to do much, but if you let that scare you away, you will be missing one of the nicest places to live on earth.

Fall and spring are magnificent. We often sleep with the windows open. This has been an exceptionally cold and unusual winter and still it was 50F here today at our house in Bluewater Cove. My "winter" coat would be laughed at by Canadians.

The truth is that you get used to the humidity and heat. That being said there is a difference in the climate across the south. We can go ten miles inland in the summer and the temperature jumps ten degrees or more.

There are times when the river water is warm and only the ocean offers relief but that warm water makes for fall warmth that can last into December. I picked my last tomato on December 19th last year and got my first one the first week of June.

As to living in the mountains of North Carolina, our friends who live in Boone just headed to Florida, they couldn't take the snow any longer.

Don't let people scare you way from the NC coast. Put shorts and a tee-shirt on and embrace the warmth. It is better than shoveling snow. I have done both, and given a choice, I will be right here near the beaches of Emerald Isle.

Check out my blog on living here and the site where I have area pictures and information posted.

Thank you for a very interesting post relative to living on the Carolina coast. I have had the opportunity to vacation there several times over the last few years. Sadly, the person I spent those vacations with recently passed away. She made those walks along Atlantic Beach and dips in the surf among the most memorable experiences in my life. Isn't there a saying about always returning to the place where one got sand in their shoe?