“Emerald Bay” by Michael – originally posted to Flickr as Emerald Bay. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Emerald_Bay.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Emerald_Bay.jpg

T his week has been filled with a different type of inspiration hunting for sure! Instead of looking through magazines I’ve been on home finding sites!

My husband has three years before he can retire. As much as Emma and I have tried talking him into staying in California, he’s not having anything to do with it. This being the case, I’ve changed gears and have started to look at possible places to plan our future.

We’ve looked at Washington because it’s beautiful and my sister lives there and I’d LOVE to be near her.  We then started looking in Oregon because it’s so close to her. We also looked in Idaho for the same reasons, it’s a wonderful and beautiful retirement state.  Then, we looked into Wyoming because we have very good friends (Hi Laura!) who are going to retire there. It’s also beautiful and the cost of living is great. That lead us to look at Montana, because it’s awesome! However, looking at all of these places, we just felt disconnected from them. We don’t really have a place in our hearts for any of them. They’re not special to us for any other reasons other then being special to people we love. Seriously, Look at these Google images:

Oregon

Wyoming

Montana

Idaho

Washington

Who wouldn’t want to live in any one of these places? Notice the 100+ more on each image, because they don’t run out of beautiful in places like these.

Now here’s the deal, I have three children. Only, they aren’t all children. Two of them are adults and I can’t just make them go live where we live.  This is the place I make my decisions from. You see, I didn’t spend 22 years of my life investing in my children so I could take off and leave them here. I raised them to be the kind of people I’d like to grow old around. Furthermore, they actually like us and want to live near us when they start building their own lives and families. So, we need to choose a place that would fulfill our desire to have some property and a quiet place to “retire” but still has enough life going on that would engage our kids and allow them to build careers and raise their own families. PS, Steve and I are fairly young and we like to be active, we want to boat, camp, fish, shop, see plays and still travel. We want to do it with our family. We also want to be around our extended families and friends. So we started looking in what I call “the middle area.”

Last year we entered the HGTV dream home contest. I’m telling you I wanted to win that house more than anything. So much so I entered every single day, every single way I could. It wasn’t for the home, although it was fabulous, it was because it was in Tahoe. I LOVE that area. I fell in love with it when I visited as a kid (Maybe just because I wanted to live on the Ponderosa). I thought it was amazing. Steve likes it because he loves the high dessert and he is in love with the Sierras. It has city, country, water, seasons and best of all it has a lifestyle that any young person in their 20’s would totally love. There are surrounding areas that are quaint and quiet and one can still buy property there. When I mentioned it to everyone here it just clicked! The girls were immediately in and so was Steve. It was like we all just tried on the perfect shoe. It’s also a day’s drive to everyone we want to be close to. So, this is where we are looking. We’ll be traveling up there to see a couple of places we’ve found on those home sites I’ve been looking at all week. Before I go I’ll leave you with a little bit more inspiration from the California/Nevada landscape of Lake Tahoe.

Summer

Winter

Cabins

Notice all the 100+ more on all these images…

What is your dream location? If you could go anywhere to live where would it be?