Posted on 05/23/2021 11:12:28 PM PDT by wac3rd
Sorry about the vanity, but here goes....my wife and I sold our Bay Area home and bought a nice place in suburban Boise. Our kids were in school, limited masks and life was about 80% of normal vs. 20% in California.
Fast forward to May. My wife hates it here. She is conservative but said she would pay the high taxes, property taxes and cost of living to avoid the culture here. She thinks that our school-aged kids will not be able to prosper if they stay here in Idaho. No exposure to worldly things, more blue collar, less sophistication, etc.
I miss our friends in CA, but can work here and make the same money, so can she.
I do not want to go, I think it's going to be a drought/fire/BLM summer and as soon as a new strain of COVID hits, lockdowns and more.
I am at an impasse. I could stay (she offered it) but lose my family, or go and just deal with the insanity.
I am going to move back because my family comes first but am extremely aggravated and sad to leave a place where they value God, the USA and freedom.
Sorry to vent. We have 7 years until the little one graduates HS, so I will hold out until then.
Anyway, anyone else heard of a blue state exodus who does a U-turn in 9 months?
Registering independent or “no party” usually stops that. They assume you are an anti-government crank and won’t call you in. ‘Republican” is equal to “Sheep” and earns many a summons in your mailbox. :)
Rumor has it some of the NY to Florida peeps revert. Big climate differential, they miss the city, etc. Rich folks - or rich enough - can afford to move to NYC suburban areas.
As others have said there are dozens of locations between CA and Idaho. Since I don’t know either of you and have only heard your side, I’ll just say good luck.
Time for a new wife.
Still is a pleasant place. Seems to be a lot more traffic compared to 20 years ago. Big build-outs north and northeast. Networking connectivity has reached the point of 1 Gbps fiber for select areas. Adequate shopping locally..except for a decent bookstore. Off to Idaho Falls for that.
An interesting thing I’ve noticed from experience: it’s never quite the same as you remember. That’s because nostalgia colors your memory. I don’t mind visiting to enjoy the highlights but I’ll never return to live the same life I had in California.
Thankfully not. My wife is certainly a strong willed woman, but she’s also genuinely kind and usually reasonable. We’ve always made things work and I’m thankful for her.
But even in a marriage where things are not going well, I was always raised that the sacrament of marriage is a divine gift and should be treated as such. It’s a bond sealed by God. Breaking that? Better have some pretty major reasons you can explain to Him.
This does not bode well for you FRiend. Are there other underlying problems? Your conservative wife seems to not be taking her husbands concerns into account and in a conservative family, while you support each other, you still wear the pants. Also there are other places to go, not just CA. Besides the lousy economics of moving back to CA, CA is not friendly to fathers in divorce/custody. If you are currently Idaho residents, I would consider how you position yourself against being alienated from your family, how to not get suckered into CA family court, and seek Christian based family counseling with your wife before making any decisions.
Sorry for the frank reply. Prayers for you and your family.
Back in the day Alaskans would say: “Happiness is 10,000 Okies headed back south with a Texan under each arm.”
Please go back to where you and your wife came from and take some friends with you. I encourage it. This is not the place for you.
Enjoy your life and your family where you are all comfortable and wanted.
Have a great life in the Bay Area. It is calling you home.
“There are other CA refugees here she knows (all women) who want to go back to Walnut Creek/Lafayette area.”
There is your problem lady! She needs to get away from that group and spend her time in the here and now. She can be happy in Idaho only after she gets away from that bunch. They are feeding on each others nostalgia and building it up into someplace better than it is.
Good luck breaking that psychology!
She might want to get to know with all those “small town” folks.
We have the reverse situation!
My wife and I are close to 70, so the kids are raised and on their own. We have lived on the San Francisco Peninsula in a small town since 1983. My wife is a native Californian from the East Bay. Like many people, we are dismayed by the insanity of one-party Democrat government as well as the over-growth of our town by developers and the constant pressure from Sacramento to build our “fair share” of low-income housing. We both worked hard to get where we are and live in a nice town with single family homes. Now the Dems are working on bills to let people build two homes o quarter-acre lots AND two attached ADUs AND two detached ADUs. That would be six houses in a quarter acre. We are absolutely fed up.
During our travels the past 25 years, we always looked at places and asked ourselves “would we like to retire here?” We visited my aunt and uncle in Twin Falls, ID many times. They had lived in Ketchum, ID (Sun Valley area) for almost 40 years before returning to Twin. We liked Ketchum a lot, but there weren’t enough year-round people for us.
One year I took my wife up to the Idaho Panhandle where my mom was born and my grandparents had retired in the 60s. My wife immediately fell in love with the area around Coeur d’Alene so we started taking more add-on trips there after visiting my Uncle in Twin (my aunt had now passed). We loved the beauty, the conservatism, the friendliness of everybody, the politeness of the kids, the natural beauty, the lakes, and lots more.
We found a nice house near a lake and, after a lot of soul searching, bought it as a second home three years ago. I thought we were buying it as a summer place and we would winter in California. We are fortunate we could keep the California house. I spent a good part of two years in Idaho doing a lot of renovation and improvements (I’m retired).
In March 2020, my wife was planning a week-long ski trip to our Idaho place when COVID hit. Her work shut down and told everybody to work remotely, so she grabbed the dog and drove up to Idaho. She’s been here 14 months now and has made a LOT of new friends here. We joined a nearby country club with a “social membership” (no golf privileges) and met a lot of people that way. My wife learned how to play pickleball and plays at the local gym most days of the week during the winter and on the outdoor courts at the club in the summer. She became great friends of a neighbor’s wife (I had met her husband earlier) and got invited to a lot of dinner parties. We’ve become good friends with a lot of neighbors and have had lots of dinner parties. There are five ski resorts within an hour of hour place, and season ticket prices are cheap. My wife bought new ski gear and went skiing with friends several times this winter. She made some good friends at the local dog park where she takes our doggy to run and play. She’s gone hiking, biking and walking with a friend she met there. Our kids’ preschool teacher in California is from Idaho and introduced us to some of her sorority sisters from the U of I and my wife became good friends with one of the gals. We’ve been to their new house on Lake Coeur d’Alene several times and had them over.
I spent the winter in California helping our daughter remodel the house she bought in the Bay Area and doing deferred maintenance on our California house.
My wife retires at the end of June and she has to be in her office in California the last three weeks of June to train her replacement. We will both be there for the three weeks. Then she says that, on July 1, we are driving to Idaho and she will never return to California again.
As you can see, my wife is really outgoing and makes friends easily. I am really thrilled she loves Idaho so much.
So we are working to figure out how to manage retirement together. She is 100% committed to being a full-time Idahoan. She has never loved a place more than here. We may rent out the CA house or sell it. Or maybe keep it as a winter retreat for me, at least for a while. Our original plans to be Idaho snowbirds went up in smoke when she discovered how much she loves Idaho.
I am as disgusted with CA and it’s vile politics as anybody, but it’s been home for me for nearly 50 years and it’s hard to say good bye to our hometown, the beauty and mild winters.
We will figure it out. Fortunately, the kids are grown so we don’t have that constraint. Good luck to you and your wife. Perhaps my story will give you both inspiration and food for thought.
I am truly blessed that my wife fell in love with North Idaho so much and is thrilled to be here.
Hopefully, it will be mostly leftists who do the U-turns.
I don’t know why your wife would rather torture herself like this, but best of luck to you.
I certainly don't. I drove I-84 through Boise; that eight-lane freeway must've gone on for ten miles. That's a pretty big city.
She sounds more like a valley girl than a conservative things appear to be more important then honest culture.
Bring the bling baby
Buying a house in Star as an investment
It will be $2MM to buy a house or more.
If she can so easily say that you are welcome to stay in ID, but she is going to CA, there are far more pressing issues between the two of you than where you live. As someone who lived in a similar, toxic relationship, I’d be bailing out now. Even IF you decide to move back to Cali, you will constantly be under threat of her ratting you out over guns, and other issues. Way to toxic sounding, my FRiend.
I agree with this. Add to the colored memories is the fact that once we move, even for a short time, it colors the old place upon are return. Spending time in the new place gives us new experiences and views that shift our experience when we go back to the old. Life changes us in ways we see and sometimes do not.
I’ve been here with my ex. When I was caring more about where I was living and determined to live there with or without him there were already underlying issues about our relationship. I knew at the time when I realized I would not follow him anywhere anymore, we were in a very different place that felt we were more separate people doing what we both wanted as opposed to a married team.
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