For me, since I’ve been 100% remote for 8 years now, I can live pretty much anywhere I want, as long as there’s decent Internet. As my kids all grew up and moved out to live their own lives, I asked myself where I really wanted to live. One was Ecuador, specifically because of the tropical climate combined with high altitude rain forests. The other was the PNW. My partner and I came up to Eugene, OR and did a massive three day tour of Oregon and southern Washington looking for a place to live and finally settled on Eugene, at least to start. Now we live in northern Salem, OR and we absolutely love it here. The climate (bring on the rain!), the overall feeling of the people, the forests and beaches, just all of it really. To be fair, there are definitely still a number of hateful angry people who live in rural areas, which can be problematic, but overall it’s lovely.
What made you move?
Moved here this year after too many years of feeling unsafe being openly gay in public living in the midwest. I was even in a medium sized city but there are just too many small minded backwards people there, my partner and I didn’t even feel safe holding hands in public. Now we’re in the PNW and feel like we can just be normal without constantly worrying that someone will see us “looking gay in public” and react with hostility.