Ohio is worse than average. If you live in Ohio and don’t travel much outside of it you might not be aware of the difference.
Michigan overall tends to be more liberal, although there are some deep Red islands. Lake County, Indiana is outside of Chicago, still livable, and Blue. Indiana has its Red but I’ll just note that when Ohio banned abortion quite a few people jumped the state line into Indiana, including one famous case, because as Red as Indiana is, Ohio is still redder. Most of the Illinois “coast” is taken up by Chicago, but the northern suburbs have their share of Blue and Purple. Wisconsin has not just Red but also Blue and Purple areas. Can’t speak for Minnesota, I’ve never been there.
Yep, and no-see-ums, and horeseflies. Luckily they tend to settle down by mid-July. Believe it or not, the bug in Duluth (black-flies included) are relatively tame compared to my home-town of Thunder Bay, which are themselves relatively tame compared to the bugs further north. People who live and work up there will wear thick clothing in the heat, with duct-taped wrists and ankles, along with a bug net. If you ever wanted to see the Arctic and actually enjoy it, make sure you wait until later in the season.
That seemed strange to me since I’m mostly familiar with rural North-East Minnesota, but looking at some electoral maps I see that they’re quite an outlier.
My recommendation is west Michigan. Check out Holland specifically (a liberal island in the more conservative ottawa county). Close to lakes-- Michigan, Macatawa and many smaller ones. Nice climate, snowy yet tolerable (imo) winters. Resort town in the summer, college town in the winter. Easy drive to Grand Rapids (30 minutes), Traverse City (<3 hours), Detroit (~3 hours), Chicago (2.5 hours), Mackinac Island/the UP (4 hours). Great hospitals across West Michigan too.
Grand Rapids would be another suggestion if you like more of a “city” vibe.
Going further north, for cooler winters and summers, Traverse City.
How certain are you that you won’t need to supplement that bookkeeping income with some other employment? It’s surprising your advisor is recommending you quit your job as a means to saving money.
Have you addressed potential professional licensing concerns?
I came in to steer you toward Traverse City, MI, but I don’t disagree with Happy’s Lake Michigan suggestions. Look at Holland, Saugatuck, Grand Haven, and South Haven.
Yeah, my BiL was born in Maine. Met my sister in Providence R.I. Followed her back to CA where they got married. He kept saying he didn’t want to raise kids in L.A., so after about 5 (?) years he found a job in Maine, and they moved. They had two kids right away, and by the time the second was about 1.5 yo, they moved back to CA. It wasn’t as he remembered it, and my sister was going crazy.
Reading the OP, I wonder if you shouldn’t also consider New England.
I’ve lived all over the country (including northern California and the Chicago area), and New England has a lot going for it.
If you are looking for a [relatively] lower cost of living near the coast, I would particularly look at Maine or New Hampshire. We have winters here in New England too, though the summers are getting hotter.
Once you leave the PNW and get homesick, you will likely never be able to afford moving back. So you are making a lifetime commitment. Might just want to look at some small towns in Eastern Oregon instead.
Black flies, chiggers, deer ticks, oppresive humidity and bitter cold winters, and many other things that Oregon lacks. If you want to get a feel for Minnesota, watch the movie, Fargo. It was not filmed in North Dakota where the town of Fargo is.
When I was young I spent a few months in up state New York. Small, pleasant town called Carthage, just outside of Watertown. 10 feet of snow was not uncommon there. Whenever I told anyone that I was from Oregon the response was invariably, “Why are you here?” We are all trying to get out!"
I live in Portland now, grew up spending summers on the west coast of Michigan and still get there yearly.
I totally get what you’re saying about Portland heat the last few years. But all it takes is a few days and nights in Midwest humidity to remember how awful it is, even compared to the 95+ Portland days.
That said, it’s tolerable along the shore, especially as you move north toward Traverse City. Any of Happy_Lendervedder’s suggestions are good ones. Grand Rapids is a nice town, but you’re 45-60 minutes from the coast and you don’t get quite the lake cooling effect, so it depends on how close to water your wife needs to be (and if small lakes count).
With you and your wife both in your 50s, you need to seriously consider health care, no matter how healthy you are right now. Sure, the major health institutions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, etc. all have satellite facilities in smaller cities, but your choice of a local, primary-care physician may be limited, not to mention that cardiologist or orthopedist you find yourself needing as your 50s become your 60s. And that 50 mile drive to the “good” hospital is a lot more daunting when it’s snowing.
I’m 20 minutes from 3 hospitals, one with a cath lab and a cancer treatment center, and all 3 part of larger medical systems. Mosquitoes are a pain, but down by the beach they’re usually not too bad. Biting flies are a problem a handful of days out of the year, and while we do have ticks, we don’t have a lot of them right here. I haven’t found one on myself, the wife, or our free range cat in the last 5 years, and I have 60 acres of woods we all roam in.
Ian Anderson of ‘Jethro Tull’ performed in Sheboygan’s Weill Center a few years back as have some other notable stars. Community theater is active also there, and the Kohler family (famous for bathrooms/toilets) has sustained the city’s art museum and even added a new annex for it. Other cultural stuff happens in Port Washington and other nearby communities, not to mention Milwaukee, 45 minutes to the south.
The city of Sheboygan votes blue, the rest of the county votes red, making the mix fairly purple. We ‘Lakeshore Liberals’ do what we can to change hearts and minds.
@snowthx the Cali folk have already invaded, and turned into cheeseheads/Packers fans.
Re: The west coast of Michigan, especially Traverse City… I would be totally into that idea. But, I’m not sure I want to go with smaller communities. I chose Duluth and Green Bay because they are mid-sized cities, and would have those Real Hospitals, for when we need them years down the line. Am I wrong about this regarding Traverse City?
I actually applied for a job in Traverse City about 10 years ago, and was really excited about it then. I think it would be an awesome place to live, but another issue is that it’s a bit pricier than Duluth and Green Bay. Not by a huge amount, though. Now I’m thinking I should add it as a third destination for our trip next August, and consider it as a possible final destination.
You don’t need a license to be a bookkeeper. My wife has a B.S. in accounting, and she is the brains of the operation. I’ve been picking it up as I’ve gone along over the last several years, and part of my plan is to take classes (while I’m still teaching, so I can do it for free). She has been turning away potential clients, because we’re full up. She is a charter member of a networking group, and that won’t change if we leave the area. There’s a shortage of bookkeepers in America. Thus… I am quite certain that we will never want for clients.
One more point, about my wife’s requirement of not being “land-locked.” We will need to be right on the water. I don’t mean our house needs to be right on the water, but whatever town we choose does. So places like Grand Rapids are out.
Our kids went to college in Duluth, and we still have a house there that we currently rent out. I was just there a few weeks ago (a business deduction, checking out the property). The temperature at the top of the hill was about 85°F but along the lake it was 63°F. That’s where the house is; it doesn’t have air conditioning because it really isn’t needed there except for a couple days each year. We’re considering putting in AC just as a selling point. Plus, our daughter would really like to move back there and buy our house eventually.
Duluth gets lots of snow, but they know how to remove it promptly, so I wouldn’t let that stop me. It does get cold for long stretches at a time, but as we say here, that keeps the big bad insects away. They’re finishing up a major hospital expansion, and the University of Minnesota and state community colleges are in town, plus across the bridge in neighboring Superior Wisconsin, if you might want to continue teaching.
Tourism has become a major industry in town, so much so that we try to avoid that area of the city in the summer. It is really cool to be able to be REALLY close to lake freighters (think Edmund Fitzgerald) when they leave or arrive the port.
It does sound like you’re genuinely enthusiastic about cold winters, so I don’t doubt your sincerity, but I would just like to point out that a lot of people who haven’t lived in snow/cold winters tend to romanticize it. They think of the beautiful fresh snowfall but don’t know the reality if scraping slush muddy ice out of everything all the damn time. The snow is beautiful right when it falls, but then it becomes muddy slushy crud all over the place. You’re scraping your car off every day, shoveling your driveway, and slipping on invisible ice patches all the time. Salt is going to get all up in your car no matter what you do. Taking a vacation in it is not the same as living in it.
But I do think the Great Lakes are a good place to be moving to now, and I think a lot of people will be doing that over the next couple of decades. It is currently extremely cheap. I grew up in Cleveland and I think about moving back sometimes because I could easily buy a house there. You could get something fairly nice for under 150k, compared to most places that start at like 400k. The climate will suffer less than most areas due to climate change, it will become relatively more appealing. Property values will increase and now is a good time to get in there. Access to water is going to be a major thing that shapes the world over the next few decades and the Great Lakes are one of the best places in the world in this regard.
The Great Lakes can be beautiful and a lot of fun. You can pretty much do anything in the Great Lakes that you can do on an ocean aside from whale watch. There are nice sandy beaches in some places, though these are rare compared most ocean coastline - there are more kind of rocky shitty beaches than nice sandy ones. You can do boat stuff, fishing, open water swimming, and IMO fresh water is a little nicer to do it in than salt water. Beautiful sunsets if you get a place where the water is to your left. I’ve been to Hawaii and California, and Cleveland consistently had nicer sunsets over the water. Apparently the pollution from the rest of the rust belt might give you lung diseases, but it creates interesting sky textures.
I would want to live somewhere that the Lakes were upwind because the cool lake breeze in the summer is one of the most pleasant things I’ve ever felt. It can make the winters colder, though - yes, it can moderate the actual temperature a bit, but you get coast effect winds that can get pretty rough and the added humidity makes the cold more biting. Upwind tends to be towards the sunset, too. Personally I’m only really considering northeastern Ohio and western Michigan for that reason. Western Michigan has some nice little areas with nice beaches.
Cleveland has excellent medical care available too. The Cleveland Clinic is world famous and for whatever reason in general Cleveland bats above its league in medical services. Cleveland became the butt of a lot of jokes and it’s basically a meme, but it’s not really deserved. It’s less bland or boring than a hundred other big cities in the US that no one makes fun of and a lot of the suburbs are really nice.
