I have been trying to retire for a couple of months now. Soon (I hope) I won’t need to be close to Huntsville, Alabama, where I have been working for the last 27 years. With both of our parents gone now, we have been talking about moving away from here in the northwest corner of Georgia.
Back in 1999 I bought the land where we now live. It’s near the top of Lavender Mountain, overlooking Rome to the south and, on a good day, with a view all the way to Kennesaw Mountain, just outside of Atlanta. Over the next five or six years I built the house. I hired a carpenter and one helper, and then the three of us framed and dried-in the structure. My good friend Tom came to visit from New Mexico and helped with some of the work. Other people came around sometimes to help, including Leah and my brother and both of my parents occasionally. My father, who worked as an electrician in his youth, planned to help me do the wiring, but he died before we could start. He did do a lot of heavy manual labor when I was clearing the hundreds of small pines off the lot.
I hired contractors for the work I didn’t trust myself to do. I had an electrician do the wiring, a plumber do the rough-in, drywall hangers do the hanging and mudding, and a floorer do the wood and tile. But the rest, my family, friends and I did ourselves. And, in case you haven’t built a house, that is a lot.
Leah and I got married in May, 2005, and moved into the house. We mostly like living here. It’s quiet and can be quite beautiful. Leah would prefer to be a little closer to the grocery store, and I wish I had cut a lot more trees early on. Winters are reasonably mild, and spring and fall can be very nice, at least for short periods. But the summers in Georgia are brutal. It’s hot and humid and you can’t do anything outside without getting soaked in sweat. Plus the house is too big. Upstairs we have three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Downstairs, which is not completely finished, has a large family room and another bedroom and bathroom. That’s way too much for two middle-aged – no, wait a minute, I think we are already past that age. Oh well, never mind that part. We have a fair amount of money in the house, and we would like to think we could sell our house, buy a smaller house, and then have a little left over.
Anyway, we are thinking, but we don’t have any place in particular in mind. I would like to live some place where it’s not quite so humid, but not really arid. Leah tends to agree with that, with the proviso that it not be too cold or too hot. I think we could handle cold more easily than hot, but I don’t really want a harsh climate. Neither of us wants to live in a big city, but realistically, we should probably be reasonably close to a reasonably large town. Rome is reasonably large, by our standards. There are decent places to buy food, and, if we should get sick, there are two fairly large hospitals. I’m not sure whether we could stand a really dry area. I found on a cross-country motorcycle trip that I suffered green withdrawal when I rode across Utah and Nevada. I was surprised at what relief it was to see green trees when I reached the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Just for the fun of it, back in June I started tracking temperatures in Terlingua, Texas, and Alamosa, Colorado. Terlingua is right outside Big Bend National Park. Alamosa is in south central Colorado, near but not really in the mountains. I used the Yahoo weather app on my iphone. I laughed every time I looked at Terlingua, because the highs were over 100 F every day. Alamosa was also funny, because the lows were generally shown in the 30s. Perfect. Just average them.
The Yahoo numbers don’t seem to track with other weather data, so I checked a few sources online. Based on what I found, the June temperatures in Terlingua were pretty much mid-90s, except for a few upper 80s and a few 100s. The lows started around 68 and ended up around 72. There was a decent amount of rain for such a generally dry area. Average annual precipitation is just under 12 inches.
Alamosa had highs in the 70s and 80s, with lows from the upper 20s early in the month to around 50 later on, with a little over a half an inch of rain. It was a surprise to me that Alamosa has a drier climate than Terlingua. Average precipitation is under 8 inches per year. Still, I have to laugh a little: on average there are only two months without freezing temperature, July and August (usually).
For comparison, in June Rome, had highs in the mid to upper 80s with a few 70s late in the month. Lows were mostly in the upper 60s. Rainfall was about 6 and a quarter inches. Rome gets an average of 56 inches of precipitation a year. That’s just four inches short of five feet of rain a year. We have droughts, but the rain in even our drought years would wash Terlingua and Alamosa completely away.
We are not really considering moving to Terlingua or Alamosa (although if I had multiple lives I might consider living in both at least for a while. Just for the hell of it, you know.) But we still don’t really know where to move to.
Does anyone have any ideas?
