The Arizona Experiment!
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Nov 2, 2023
- 95 comments
The Arizona Experiment!
The thing that drew me to early retirement is freedom, and that’s still the best part of it. Back in 2005, the primary reason for this freedom-seeking was being able to devote my best hours to being a Dad. I had a feeling my career in tech would be too demanding once the full-time job of raising children kicked in.
Eighteen years later, wow has that guess ever turned out to be right! Early retirement has proved to be the most amazing, worthwhile adventure and it’s still just getting started. It was an astonishing thirteen years ago that I wrote about Little MM starting kindergarten, and now he’s done with high school.
It has given me the space to enjoy so many new experiences—working hard and playing hard sometimes, but also slowing things way down when necessary to deal with and grow through some real hardships.
But now, with that child-raising phase finally almost done, I’m cashing in a few of those Freedom Chips for a particularly big change: moving to a warm sunny place for the winter to try out a new life in the walkable, bikeable, car-free community you’ve probably heard me raving about in the past: Culdesac Tempe.
So on the first of December, I’ll be packing up the essential clothes, tools, and gadgets, and throwing my very best mountain bike onto the Model Y to make the epic road trip across the mountains. Just in time to escape the incoming Colorado winter. And my son will be joining me for the trip!
Looking for updates?
I have added a separate tracker page here.
Heading West…
We’ve booked ourselves a spacious two-bedroom apartment there, for four full months. Little MM will be roughly alternating his months between Arizona and Colorado so he can still have time with both parents. While I’ll be there the whole time.
A big part of the fun is that this will force me to invent a whole new life for myself, away from the easy comforts of the big community and plentiful construction sites that keep me so busy here. It will be both a big change and a significant challenge, which is exactly what all of us need on a regular basis to keep life full of meaning and joy.
So What Are You Going to Do in Arizona?
Looking forward to replacing this with a real Arizona mountain biking picture I will be taking soon.
The exact details are still in the works, and I’d love to hear your ideas and feedback (see the "get in touch" note below). But here’s what I’ve got so far:
- Meet as many new people as possible, and answer the burning question we all have: what kind of people choose to move to a car-free neighborhood in the center of a super-car-based metropolis?
- And of course, hang out with existing friends who live in the area—did you know our own Coverage Critic (aka Chris Smith) already lives in Culdesac?
- Share some of the experiences, whether good or bad, here on MMM and on places like Twitter and Instagram so you can live vicariously through this experience.
- Use my newly liberated extra free time to visit their kickass on-site gym to get in extra good shape.
- Use more of that free time to write more blog posts and sweep some of the cobwebs off of this neglected online persona of mine.
- Look at the weather app on my phone periodically to cackle at the blizzards I’m missing in Colorado and celebrate my good fortune in comparison (the typical "winter" day in Tempe is typically in the mid-70s which means sandals and palm trees and outdoor dining the whole time).
- Host a few meetups in Culdesac’s outdoor plazas like we did last March.
- Start a quirky free handyman business where I help new residents set up their IKEA furniture and move heavy stuff and hang paintings, as a combo of meeting people and being useful and exercising my compulsion to build stuff.
- Ride bikes!