Lived in California essentially my whole life. Now considering retiring to western Massachusetts (Northampton area). My daughter is probably going to settle there, is one reason.
I have not spent any time in New England although I did spend six months in Nova Scotia once, and a winter on Long Island once. That’s the closest I’ve gotten, beyond merely passing through. I have never experienced a snowy winter beyond driving to the Sierras for a week in a ski cabin (something we did at least once a year when I was growing up).
Culturally I am probably more akin to New Englanders than to Californians (ornery, independent, bookish, frugal, low key). Same for my husband. We are also experienced back to the land hippie types, we know how to milk, chop wood, can tomatoes, fix tractors, find north, that sort of thing.
Because of the insane real estate market here, we could buy three times the house there, for half the price ours is assessed at. I could finally have a sheep pasture, and a real barn, and Mr.Ulfrieda could have a machine shed and the front end loader of his dreams.
Moving 3000 miles away from every single thing I am used to is . . . an interesting thought. I mostly think it would be a wonderful adventure. However the snow is scary. I have never even driven in snow.
Opinions?
Of course we would rent for a year out there before making any decisions.
I moved to Massachusetts after spending the vast majority of life in Florida. I had never driven in snow and had never handled winter. That was in 2008. Now you couldn’t pay me to go back to Florida.
Driving in snow isn’t that hard. The best suggestion I had was to go to an empty parking lot and just drive around, braking and steering. This helped a lot.
If you are retired you can work around actual snowstorms. Just keep in the habit of having extra food and amusements around in the winter (which lasts until April), so you can avoid the crazy people buying milk, bread, and eggs, and if the power goes out you have stuff to do.
I drive an AWD SUV and find that the additional weight on my vehicle makes it easier to control. YMMV.
In Western Mass, you might find snow tires of use; I’ll let others discuss that. I live just outside the 495 loop, so I haven’t needed them – local areas keep the plows running.
Keeping animals will be different than what you’re used to… Just to give one example, outdoor water troughs will freeze and need a water heater + power source. Feed, especially hay, will probably be less expensive but also different from what you’re used to (orchard grass v. Fescue v. Timothy v. afalfa… And oh yeah - no grazing in the winter!
That’s no reason not to do it though. Local agricultural extension offices have a ton of information on livestock keeping/farming in the local area.
I am a Massachusetts transplant from Louisiana by way of New Hampshire and Vermont. I am not a big fan of the Boston area and purposely avoid it as much as possible but the Northampton area is lovely and more classically New England.
The only things that I would warn you about are that the winters are extremely long. Summer is glorious and Fall is beautiful but the latter only lasts about 6 weeks by any sane interpretation. Spring generally lasts a a few weeks at best if you can even tell that it ever happened at all. The trees are going to appear dead from late October until early May and that really wears on some people including me. I have to leave to some place warm every winter just to keep my Vitamin D and sanity in check.
The people in the area you are asking about aren’t all that friendly either but they are generally kind in that New England kind of way. It may be hard to make friends at first but it can be done even for introverts.
That said, the area does have a lot going for it. It is very pretty and has easy access to Vermont which is one of the prettiest and most pristine areas of the U.S. The people are generally well educated and there is more quaint little towns around than you could ever absorb in a life-time.
If you want to live inside a Norman Rockwell painting, that is the area for you. I don’t mean any sarcasm in that. That is what I wanted and found it in the Boston exurbs but it is even easier to achieve in the Northampton area.
Yeah, the hay thing is different. People do haylage out there, I’ve heard. Which I know nothing about. And frost lines, and freezing water troughs, it will be a whole different world.
I’m really pretty of sick of California. The climate is getting freakish (turning into a desert), and it is so horribly crowded here unless it is desolately lonely. No middle. Everything I know is here, but I am feeling like it might be time to learn about a new habitat.
Things I have thought I might enjoy about New England include the small-mixed-farms /small-towns integration that is completely lacking in the West. Farming was always an industrial-scale enterprise out here. The seasons have got to be a lot more interesting. And green! I’ve almost forgotten what sufficient moisture is like.
Today I was talking to a local friend who’d just been up in Washington state, she said there was grass there (she said “it brought back memories”, and also there was “weird wet stuff that falls from the sky”).
I have always had a strong affinity for what is rural, traditional and small-scale. In California nothing is traditional. Stuff gets wiped away and new stuff gets built on top of it, few remember or record what was there before. And nothing is small-scale except in defiance of the bigness, which is tiring. The once-rural town I grew up in was less than 500 people when I was born; now it’s almost 70,000. Which is not all that unusual here. So maybe it’s time to leave. Before the whole place burns down.
Well I grew up in California, learned to drive in California, now I live in Denver.
I hate snow. As a little kid in LA I always wanted it to snow. I’d seen snow, but I wanted to see it coming down. Okay, now I’ve seen it coming down. I’ve driven in it. I’ve shoveled it off my driveway. A lot. It sucks.
The Northampton area is really nice, but you should know that it isn’t the traditional “New England” kind of place. There are a lot of colleges around there, including Smith College. There is a division of residents in Northampton between the farmer-types and the college people. It can apparently get kind of ugly on the local politics level. Northampton is the unofficial lesbian capital of Massachusetts, and the associated liberalism doesn’t necessarily sit well with some of the more old-school types.
Northampton has great restaurants, is the cultural hub of western Massachusetts, and tons of opportunities for learning. Easthampton is also coming right along.
An example of Noho - There was an AA meeting at the local church, which was attended by the local dry chapter of the Hell’s Angels (I guess if you decide to quit drinking, you get booted to this club). After the meeting, you could always spot the Hell’s Angels hanging out in the local ice cream shop along with some transgendered individuals who were just beginning their treatments. It was so unexpected for these groups to get along well, but they really did.
If you are talking about moving to the Noho-area, meaning Sunderland or other places like that, just keep in mind that you will be away from things. You will have to drive to get to anything. It’s not far, and if you like quiet, you will get it.
The best cannolis in Massachusetts are to be had at the La Fiorentina bakery in NoHo. It’s a proven fact.
I moved to MA a bit more than a year ago and we love it. We love it so much, in fact, that we recently bought a house and have settled down permanently here because it is such a wonderful, wonderful place. I think you’ll be glad you made the move when all is said and done!
Yeah, I kinda got that about Northampton. My daughter will be there, but although I’m politically liberal I’m more comfortable with the farmers. They might not be all that accepting of me, but in general I’ve found that if you genuinely respect farming, are moderately knowledgeable, and are keen to learn, farmers are almost always unusually generous friendly people.
Ok, someone has to tell you the truth. The Northhampton area is largely unexplored. That part of a map of Massachusetts is usually marked with the warning “There be monsters here!”. People who move to that area are often never seen again. It’s about 400 miles from Boston, so even if you can find a paved road you’ll have to travel for 9 to 10 hours just to get to the Worcester area, and then it’s about 3 days sitting in traffic to get to Boston from there. There’s a rumored northwest passage that will take you to a part of New York located above the Arctic Circle, but no has ever survived a trip on that route.
You really should consider moving further east to the civilized part of the state where people drive four cars across on a two lane street with trucks double parked on both sides. Or come down here to Rhode Island where we’re about to re-elect a twice convicted felon to the state’s highest office, Mayor of Providence.
As long as you don’t mind five month long winters, sure, come on over. When you’re shopping for a house, make sure it has a fire place or a woodstove. You’ll need it if we have an ice storm that knocks out power. Most houses have one or the other, or occasionally both, though. I went to college with several kids from CA and they were able to weather our winters just fine, so don’t let it worry you too much. You just need to prepare for them.
