I currently live in Phoenix, AZ and it has been the best place for me. 17 years now. I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and went to college in Philadelphia, PA. After college I moved to the Midwest and lived in Chicago IL for many years, moving around to live in many parts of the area. Then I moved to St. Louis (Ferguson) MO for one year. Then I moved to Madison, WI for one year. After that, I moved to Des Moines, IA for 13 years. I moved back to Pittsburgh, PA for several years and finally decided to retire in a climate that was warm and sunny. It's hot in Phoenix during the summer... very hot and humid. Temperatures this summer went up to 117º F. And it stays hot at night. The hottest ever recorded was 122ºF. Not much difference when you get past 110ºF -- it's very dangerous to be outside without proper planning and lots of water! I sometimes think I would like to move to Mexico, but... I know that won't happen. I'm tired of moving around, and have my feet firmly planted on the ground here! When it's not summertime, the weather is gorgeous and very pleasant. People come here from cold climates to stay through the winter in a warm climate -- we call them snowbirds!
I grew up in Pittsburgh and moved to Chicago after that....married and had my two children in Chicago! This was on the early 70's. After a few other places, I ended up in Hot Fresno California! My favorite city is Chicago though. My son lives in Glen Carbon Illinois and in September while I was visiting them they took me for a long weekend to Chicago....enjoyed it but it sure seemed more crowded after 35 years.
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio very similar to Pittsburgh and Chicago weather. I moved to the Metro DC area lived here for many years, left to move to San Jose California and moved back. Then I tried Atlanta, Ga. and moved back, I think I will stay here lots to do always.
I've been lucky enough to live in two of the nicest cities in the UK. I lived in Oxford for eleven years and in Edinburgh for five, though I worked in Edinburgh for twenty years. I've lived in a few other towns as well. I spent a while in Ireland, too, plus around two and a half years in three different countries in Africa.
I was born and raised in Makati City, the business hub of our country where you will find the tall buildings of Metro Manila. When I married, I moved to the adjacent Mandaluyong City which is also progressive.In 2001, we were able to buy our own house here in the suburban town of Cainta, located in the nearby province of Rizal. I love this present place we are in because this village is a middle class subdivision with lots of trees. Different sounds of birds can be heard in the morning and the air is somewhat fresh unlike in Metro Manila. Another plus is the more than 2 acres of grassy field just 3 houses away from our home. We have frogs here and some animals (have you seen the pic I posted where an egret was sitting on a cow?). Back to reality, my place of work is in Makati and the travel time for the 15 kilometers distance takes approximately 2 hours due to the heavy traffic. It's only Sundays that the traffic is light. So far, this is the best place for me except for the traffic and the floods.
Corie, that sounds so good and, yes, I saw your photo of the egret on the cow….fun to see and beautiful
I am very happy living on the south coast of England, where I now have easy access to a lot of lovely coastline, countryside, picturesque old villages and places of historic interest. Previously, I lived in London (from 1985 to 2007). Sometimes I still yearn for life in the capital city, usually when I'm reading a novel set in London or seeing it on the screen. I can easily visit but it's not the same as living in of the world's great cities.
Home right now in Hawaii is on the island of Oahu in a town called Kalihi. Kalihi is lumped together and called Honolulu. Honolulu is so big that it goes from east to west for some miles. I was raised in Pearl City farther west than Kalihi. West is country and east is what we call town side of Honolulu. Though I traveled to the outer island Oahu is home. We lived in Pearl City since I was born till I graduated from Waipahu High School. Then our landlord changed hands and the old buildings we lived in since the l940's had to come down, so we moved to the country to my Uncle's country home which we lived in rent free until we found ourselves our new home. Country has it's quaintness and it's rural smells that if you were in the direction where the wind blew farm smells and there were pig farms near by you'd not want that to be a long time for the wind to bring farm smells to your home. It was home though and we lived there rent free who could complain. We found ourselves a nice apartment near Pearl City in Aiea just a few miles east of Pearl City and we lived there for about a decade. Then the landlord's family needed a home so we were the youngest there so we were asked to move and now we live in Kalihi near Marukai Wholesale Mart. I like cooler weather and my Mom whom I live with likes warmer weather. In the summer I can be sitting using the computer and be perspiring in Kalihi like it was this past summer. Mostly the weather in Kalihi is pleasant and in the 80's. I wish we had 70 degrees weather year round!
I live in Oklahoma the past four and a half years. Up until moving here I lived in Texas all my life, most of it in the West Texas town of Lubbock. I lived in Lubbock forty-seven years, forty-four in the same house. I suppose I'm content here in Oklahoma but I miss the flat plains of west Texas and eastern New Mexico. I'm too old to do any more moving.
I spent a good share of my life in upstate NY. Rolling hills, lots of woods and very near the Adirondack Mountains. Did I mention snow? Lots of it. Spent a couple years in California, Army, in the wine country of Paso Robles. Now reside in Florida, right coast, in a place called Palm Bay. Near the ocean and mostly pleasant weather. If I were a young person again, I would choose the NY area that I lived in before. Beautiful country. However, where I am now...no more snow.
The place I loved the most is the high desert in southern California. We didn't have a town close by, the closest thing was a truck stop area along the I-5 freeway. We had to drive seventy two miles each way to work every day but it was so worth it. The summer days were hot and dry, but every evening the breeze picked up and the temp. dropped to pleasant. We had snows in the winter between bouts of mild weather. It was part way up the mountain side and we had such a beautiful view of the whole valley floor. When we both got laid off about the same time after working for the companies that we had worked for for more than twenty five years we had to sell. So we ended up in Tn.
QUOTE="Chris Ladewig, post: 77729, member: 315"]The place I loved the most is the high desert in southern California. We didn't have a town close by, the closest thing was a truck stop area along the I-5 freeway. We had to drive seventy two miles each way to work every day but it was so worth it. The summer days were hot and dry, but every evening the breeze picked up and the temp. dropped to pleasant. We had snows in the winter between bouts of mild weather. It was part way up the mountain side and we had such a beautiful view of the whole valley floor. When we both got laid off about the same time after working for the companies that we had worked for more than twenty five years we had to sell. So we ended up in Tn.[/QUOTE] @Chris Ladewig How I love your post! Would you reveal just a little bit more? How high in altitude, what kind of work was it? What a wonderful way to enjoy life! Frank
The best would have to be the years we spent in the small Village of Somersham, UK. Nicest people you would ever want to meet. Helped us in every way to adjust to life in the village. Rented an older house and when I asked what the address was, they said it didn't have a number, it had a Name. The Drove House. It had a ceramic plate on the front door. We got to keep it when we left.
I would have to say my hometown of Wallace, Michigan. For a teenager and young man, there isn't much to do there, as there would be in a larger city and, for an adult, there are few options as far as earning a living. But for a child, at least during the time that I was a child, it was perfect. Wallace is a very small town. The closest we had to a traffic light was a blinking yellow, and we had only one of those. If you were driving through, all you would have seen was a small Chevrolet dealership, a grocery store, a gas station, a restaurant, a lumber yard, and a bar, as far as businesses went. There was also a small county park with a couple of baseball/softball diamonds. On the other side of town were two Little League fields and a Babe Ruth League baseball field. Near the grocery store was a Lutheran Church, and we then had an elementary school next to the volunteer fire department. The school had another baseball diamond. I sucked at it, but baseball was big then. We also had a bunt ball field in our side yard and a full-size baseball diamond with a backstop in the field across the road from our house, since the people who owned that land no longer farmed it. I enjoyed playing baseball when it was just for fun but I didn't enjoy Little League ball that much, probably because I sucked at it. Apart from a few houses, that's all you would have seen if you were driving through Wallace on Highway 41 in the 1950s and 1960s. Unless you happened to need gas, you probably wouldn't have stopped and, since gas cost about ten cents more in Wallace than in Menominee, less than fifteen miles away, you would have probably already gassed up. But an area of several miles around the townsite was considered Wallace. As a kid, we rarely went to town unless we were going to cash in some deposit bottles or buy something from the store, had a Little League game, or a Boy Scout meeting at the school. A half mile west of town was the cemetery and, further west, across the tracks, was another small housing area where people I wasn't related to lived. For the most part, they were the Lutherans, and I saw them only during school. I lived about a half mile south and a mile east of the townsite. On my road were the houses of a few of my uncles and aunts, a building that once served as a one-room schoolhouse before consolidation. I missed having attended that school by one year, being the first kindergarten class to start school in the new school. Then there was a church, the one that I attended, and just past the church was my house and another house across the road, whose inhabitants I was also related to. I was never sure just what their relationship was. They were an older couple who lived alone, as their children were already grown and gone. I think that one or the other of them was my grandfather's brother or sister. They had a granddaughter, born on the same day and year as me, who spent summers there, and she was pretty much the only girl I hung out with during my elementary school years. We're still friends since she lived near me when I was in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She was my cousin, but not a first cousin. I had three first cousins my age, including one who was born the day before me. Plus there was one other kid who was just over a year older than me, who hung out with us sometimes, or hung out with my older brother at other times. My brother was three years older than me, so we never hung out with one another in public. Around the house, we'd do things together but rarely in public. I don't think Tom had anyone his age, so he had to decide. He couldn't hang out with both of us. Enough of that. I won't go into detail about Wallace because I already told the story of Wallace in a thread in the Places I Have Lived section of the forum, and I would simply be repeating myself. What I wanted to say here was that Wallace was the perfect place for me to grow up in. I was related to pretty much everyone. No one locked their houses or took their keys out of their car. The only key we had for our house was one of those old skeleton keys that could be purchased in any hardware store and even in grocery stores, so anyone could buy a key for our house, although we never locked it so there was no reason to. We had a woods across the road that was large enough to get lost in, with a river that wound its way through it so that you might cross the river three times while walking in a straight line. It was small enough of a river that you could walk across it in most places, and jump across it in some places. Within this woods was the old townsite, which burned the same summer as the Chicago fire. Since the railroad had bypassed the town anyhow, most of the businesses had moved to the new townsite a mile and a half away, and the original townsite was completely abandoned, including the road, which had trees growing through it. Within this woods, there were foundations of houses and businesses, including a few that had parts of walls still standing. We found a section of the railroad spur with an old railroad handcart in it, covered by bushes. Old orchards had been allowed to grow wild, so there were apple trees, cherry trees, and even some grape vines growing over trees. It was a child's paradise. We had the Little River, which went through my dad's property behind our house. There were a couple of swimming holes along the river, both of which have been allowed to become overgrown and nasty in the years since I lived there. Within easy bicycling distance were two larger rivers, the Menominee River, which I thought of as the more civilized of the two, as it included places that were set apart for swimming, and had banks that weren't overgrown with brush. Water flowed rapidly through the Menominee River though, so most kids didn't dare try to swim across it. My cousins and I did, more than once, but we would be swept downstream a few miles before reaching the other side. On the other side of where I lived was the Cedar River, which then was a wild river. It was very rocky and, because few people lived along the Cedar River, brush grew down as far as the water line on both sides. There were few places to swim comfortably on the Cedar River, although we found an old swimming hole, where someone had built cement steps to. At the time that we found it, it hadn't been used for a long time and was somewhat overgrown, but it was possible to swim there without getting torn up by brush and stuff. Although a bit further away, we often biked to Lake Michigan, and because things were safer then, we would spend countless nights camping in the woods without any adult supervision, and could go on four-day bicycle trips without having any over the age of twelve with us. Television had been invented of course, but since Wallace was quite a ways from the nearest television station, very few people had a TV, so we didn't sit on the couch watching cartoons and cowboy shows all day and night. One of my uncles had a TV and people would crowd around his living room sometimes, but the reception was so bad that I couldn't tell the cowboys from the indians so I saw no reason to waste time with it. Being the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, of course we had snow in the winter. But, as kids, snow didn't mean work. It meant play and the occasional day off from school, although not like today. In my time, we had a snow day when the buses literally could not get through and there were some days when the kids who lived closer to town had to go to school and we didn't. Winter means sledding, tobogganing and, for some, it meant ice skating, although I never learned to skate. I'm not sure how that happened, as it was as if my cousins all suddenly knew how to skate, and I didn't. We also had shacks that were built well enough that we could camp out in them during the winter too, including one that was made primarily of birch bark and branches. There were also church activities but, to be honest, I never enjoyed the church activities that we had as a child, as they always consisted of things that were decided by someone who had no idea what we enjoyed doing. So that's it. Wallace will always remain the best place that I have ever lived. For me, at that time in my life, it was perfect. It might still be a good place to grow up but I don't think kids do anything outside anymore.
Finally figured out how to post a picture from my camera... This is the front plaque from the house in Somersham.