The dark side is the cost. Napa Valley’s expensive.
There are lots of good areas in eastern Tennessee. Knoxville has some reasonably priced areas, as do a lot of nearby towns. You’ve got a couple of mountains (:)), universities, health care, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratories next door. If you’re locally bored, Nashville and Atlanta are like 3 hours away.
Here’s another suggestion: check out college and university towns in the more “empty” parts of the US, as well as in the southeast. They’ll offer more amenities than the typical rural town (decent medical care, more transportation options, condos and apartment rental options), but since they are still in the less expensive parts of the US, the cost of living there will be cheaper than in most urban areas.
I just noticed that my own town has a crime rate approximately half the national average (despite being basically a suburb of Orlando, one of the most dangerous cities in America) with median home prices about $30k below the national average. And we’re a college town. So, come to Oviedo. I’ll buy you a beer.
Let’s not get hung up on the name. A city, town, village, whatever you call it I was just after the name of the area that’s all. If someone said the Chicago Land area, that’s an area even if it isn’t a city name. By the way, City is what the post office refers to the thing before the state when checking out a zip code. 
I think it would be more of an adjustment to drive a big pick-up truck than the weather itself for me. I’m a mid-sized sedan kind of guy myself. But I’m willing to adapt. If I can survive corporate bad management, I can get used to driving a big truck.
Around the country there are degrees of it being rural. I think having to wait three days for the streets to be plowed I would consider the extreme unless there is worse than that I’m not aware of in the US. After all, I’m not trying to make this experience punishing, so after I gather all the data and put it into a spreadsheet there will be a way to measure the plus and minuses of each area to factor this in. If one place is better than the other and the cost is about the same, it will make the choice easier.
College towns are a good idea. We lived in a college town for a few years after college. We moved from the area for our careers. It had extremely limited employment opportunities and the pay was low, but those concerns wouldn’t be a concern with early retirement. And living far enough away from campus might be able to find less expense homes with a few acres to be buffered against the barking dog next door.
A very kind offer indeed. It seems living far enough away from a large city that it makes a difference in crime and cost can really help. So you always have access to the larger city if needed for something that can’t be found locally.
What’s weird is we aren’t far away at all; I work close to the heart of downtown Orlando, but my commute from the farthest northeastern bedroom community is about half an hour each way. Plus, Orlando’s not really a large city; its metro population is comfortably under a million. It just has a lot of large city attributes because of its unique-ish tourism draw.
Yup. Colorado mountains here. I have my own plow. Plus owning four wheel drive vehicles is not an option. They do a pretty good job with our road, but since we are the only ones on it, we are last on the list.
Broadband is not an option either. I have satellite for TV and internet. I get maybe 250k down, and am limited to 250 megs a day. I don’t dare try to stream something.
What do you do for a living there? I’m just curious if most people are self-employed and in what kind of business?
250 MB a day would be fine for most things, but I guess that would rule out using Netflix each day to stream a movie. Interesting I didn’t think there were places like this left anymore. What would be the cost range for a 3 bedroom home on 1 acre of property in that area?
Yeah, 250k is OK for email, checking accounts the Dope and some surfing. It’s pretty slow though. Movies are out of the question.
I’m a Programmer for County Government. The lack of good internet prevents me from working at all from home (we have T1 at work). I have a 35 minute drive into a small town which really is really a nice commute. Most people would consider it zero traffic. It’s a nice drive (if your OK with snow/ice 6 months out of the year). Many folks work for the ski resorts, restaurants, etal. They are the biggest employer, with County Gov being #2.
Anywho, while very safe, many mountain communities are quite expensive due to resort activities. My house, 20 minutes from Breckenridge, is 2 bed 2 bath on 2 acres. I’d say it’s worth around 350,000. Something in town would go for at least 1,500,000.
Wyoming has no state income tax, is extremely safe due to the lack of population, and has the college town of Laramie. Winters are long, but in terms of snowfall and temperature it is no worse than somewhere like Minneapolis or Chicago. In fact I would argue the winters are better because the sun shines a lot more often here than it does in the upper midwest.
Lack of good medical care might be a strike against it though. There are hospitals and basic medical care, but to see a specialist you often have to go to Colorado.
Here in Nebraska most of the folks who live way out in the middle of nowhere are farmers and ranchers; the others are employed in businesses which directly support those farmers and ranchers, and they live in teeny weeny towns (populations of only a couple of hundred people).
Did I mention that many of the county roads here aren’t even paved? They’re gravel.
In terms of area, lots of the US is like that. In terms of where people actually live, not so much - because living in a very rural area is hard, and there just aren’t many jobs. I’d certainly not recommend the Sand Hills area of Nebraska as a retirement destination! Most of us live in Omaha and Lincoln for a reason.
Since we were talking about college towns earlier, here’s some info on the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City area. Iowa City has a first-rate medical center, so no need to travel long distances for cancer treatments and such. Iowa City itself is more expensive, but looking at the local real estate listings for towns within about an hour’s drive away, I’ve found listings for 3 bedroom, 2 bath homes with a 2-car garage on at least 1 acre of land going for around $150,000.
LUXURY!
Many of the roads where I live (Nowhere Oklahoma - literally) are sand. Not beach sand but a very fine powdery sand that it is extremely easy to get stuck in. When it rains, you don’t dare go down them. $150k for a 3-2-2 on an acre is about right for this area as well, maybe even a little high.
That must be a joy in summer thunderstorm season! 
Our part of North America is dotted with plenty of small towns with very reasonable real estate prices. For a retiree, the main issues are the absolute need to drive to get anywhere important and the distances to a major medical center for access to things like cancer chemotherapy. But as long as the person can still drive, there are plenty of low-cost options all over the Great Plains and the Southeast. Really, our OP is spoiled for choice!
Surprised that **Artemis **didn’t bring this up, but Omaha fits the OP’s requirements pretty well. The cost of living is pretty good - about 87% of USA average- and the unemployment rate is consistently low. It’s a boring city compared to New York, San Francisco, or Austin, but livable for most people.
Safety actually is a concern, though. Omaha is hardly Compton, but the crime rate is above average. Anecdotally, however, I’ve lived here about 20 years and never been a crime victim, and the most serious crimes that any of my friends have faced have been smash-and-grabs from their cars.
Not everyone agrees: Rural Nebraskan Not Sure He Could Handle Frantic Pace Of Omaha.
I remember when that article - which is wholly nonfiction, btw - first came out. About 90% of my graduating class would be right in there with Mr. Linder. A fellow I went to high school with (in a rural community with a population of 600) just moved from a sorta-suburb of Omaha to a community of about 5,000 some 250 miles west. To each his own.
BTW, North Platte theaters do have 9pm shows, and parking in 80% of Omaha is actually easier than it is in North Platte as well. Conversely, it’s damn hard to find a place open in Omaha past 10pm on a weeknight - outside of bars, of course.
I didn’t mention Omaha because relative to lots of other towns in the Great (Boring) Plains our property taxes are quite high. If the OP is interested in our fair state, he’d get better value for his money buying in a town within a reasonable drive of Omaha, like Fremont or Norfolk. Or even (brace yourself) Dennison, IA.
Finding the perfect retiree package is hard! Nice weather, decent public transportation, decent medical care, a reasonable range of activities, safe and affordable housing - seems it’s impossible to get it all.
Did you seriously just suggest Fremont? (For the uninitiated, Fremont is about 30 miles outside of Omaha, and is most noted for its meat-packing plant and severe anti-illegal immigrant laws.)
More to the point, the cost of living probably offsets property taxes to a great degree, and, as you mentioned, these can be avoided easily by living in near suburbs like those in Washington or Sarpy counties. Maybe not Fremont, though. (Norfolk is a nice enough town, but it only has about 20K people and is about two hours out of Omaha.)