Is it better to retire somewhere with adventure or somewhere you have friends? Lisa Watts writes about finding her happy place:
When the pandemic lockdown hit in March 2020, I jumped on the opportunity to squeeze a few small glasses of lemonade out of a global bag of lemons. The University of North Carolina sent my husband, Bob, and me home from our jobs as a professor and communications manager. We should go to the river house, I told Bob. I pointed out how much safer we would be in that rural, sparsely populated part of the North Carolina coast rather than staying in the college town where we lived, Durham.
All that coziness ended, though, when Bob’s spring semester wrapped up. Suddenly he found himself with wide-open days and not much to do. He’s a city guy, soothed more by busy streets and humming coffee shops than by wide-open spaces. After a few weeks he admitted that he was spinning his wheels. If this is your vision of our retirement life, he told me, I don’t think I can do it.Talk of retirement had been on the table more than ever. Bob is six years older than I am; he turned 66 that winter.
Bob could bike to the little downtown or to the beaches. He could hop a train to Boston to see old friends, or to New York City to see our kids. Then, last fall, I started a part-time job in Boston. Twice a week I’d be gone for 12 hours, commuting a few hours each way by train. The only human contact Bob might have those days was a grocery cashier, except he typically uses the self-checkout.
Where's the best place for me to retire New updates: Results by county; filter by politics, snowfall and more Bob has consulting work that gives purpose to his mornings at a downtown coffee shop. He has a competent doctor at the University of North Carolina monitoring his lymphoma.