Agreed. I have friends encouraging me to move away from the cold to the Pacific North West because they are there and winters aren’t so cold. But I have, amongst other issues, SAD. Everything I hear about winter there, makes me think I would NOT blossom due to leaden gray skies. Here, when it’s -40, the sun is shining. There, the temps are always a bit too warm to let the sun shine.
Where I live is beautiful, but if I could do my life over, I’d be living somewhere else. France has some pretty huge appeal to me. So do some other temperate locales.
There is no perfect place. I hate our long drawn out winters, but every place has something - wild fires, mud slides, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. To me a long, cold winter is the least of these worries. I guess the place I like most is where my family is. I’ll go other places to visit.
I’m 43 years old and my passport is the completely useless but now blue! British one.
I’d love to live in Shanghai again, or somewhere in central Europe like Prague or Zagreb, but it would be non-trivial to get a visa at my age. I did apply for some jobs abroad a few months ago, but didn’t get very far, so to speak, while domestically I got offers from most of the interviews I did.
I’m not sure there is a place that I like the most so much as there is a type of place I like the most. Part of what keeps me where I am is family but that’s not all of it. Even staying in the general vicinity of my family, there are options as far as urban/suburban/rural goes - and I prefer being on the urban end of that. Also, as much as I dislike snow and really cold winters , I do actually want seasons so I don’t think I’d be happy in a place where it doesn’t get below 70 degrees.
But I know way too many people who retired and moved to a place they loved on vacation and then hated living there- and most of them immediately bought a house or condo,. At the very least, if I decide to move I will rent for six months.
My wife had been coming to Santa Barbara several times a year to visit friends while I dealt with an ailing father back east. I had no interest in joining her as I thought that there was nothing I’d find interesting here. Then, during a bad winter a couple years before the one that finally crushed me, I came down for a week in November. We hadn’t even spent a day in our borrowed house before we both decided we were moving. Took a few years of vacationing here before we were able to make it happen, but we got it done and other than having to give up my large shop space in the move, we’ve never regretted it.
Not too dissimilarly , when I graduated college, I moved to Seattle on not much more than a whim. I knew nothing about the place except it had mountains, water, and coffee. And it turns out I loved it there and spent 21 great years exploring the place. I traveled a lot for work and for pleasure, and as much as I loved some of my favorite destinations (Christchurch NZ, London, New York, Hong Kong, etc) I was always glad to come back home. Until that one particularly grim, dark, damp winter finally broke me.
I moved back to Alaska after a 30 year absence of living nearly everywhere else. It was a good thing to do; we traveled all over and were very happy there. But when we retired, it just didn’t seem practical to stay. So after eleven years we moved to Oregon, which is another place I love. Now we live in a part of the country that I am not a fan of. We’ll make it work.
The place really gets its hooks into some of us. The argument that always happens in these threads about what’s worse between freezing snowy winters and horrible hot summers is amusing. I choose neither! (Yes, it’s actually cold and rainy as I write this).
MAKE IT STOP. This is worse than Seattle at this point.
i used to gently make fun of my Santa Cruz-native wife for having the narrowest band of acceptable temperatures between ‘too cold’ and ‘too hot’. Nine years of living here may have made me less tolerant than her. And I love it.