I kid you not, this is the primary reason we moved our family. DW was born and raised in New Jersey, went to grad school in Syracuse. I was born and raised around the Philly area. We lived our entire married life around the suburbs of Philly, finally settling in the far northern suburbs, not far from the Pocono mountains. Every year, we just got increasingly tired of the cold and the snow. After over 40 years of it, wears on you. The winter of '13-'14 was a brutally cold one. I had surgery on my hip that January, so I was working from home most of the winter (I wasn't supposed to drive...but did). There were mornings in February when I was in our driveway with our kids waiting for the school bus when the air temps were -4F and the wind chill was -20F. Plus there was snow on the ground that was 5' high in some drift areas...we lived in the countryside where it was windy and snow would drift like crazy. I jokingly said to DW "Let's get out of here, I can't take this stupid cold". I didn't really mean it, I was just messing around. But we started to actually talk about it and consider the possibility, and by late March we had decided to go for it. We both agreed that we would like to retire in a warm climate. DW was afraid that if we stayed in PA and our kids planted roots there that when we retire and move someplace warm, the kids would stay in PA and we wouldn't see them much. The kids were 9, 6, 6 at the time. So that was really the biggest reason we decided to move. We figured it was a now or never type thing, so we just took a gamble, picked up our stuff and moved. It happened fast...we made the decision in March and had selected Atlanta as our destination. That part was pretty cool. When we first started talking about is seriously, the entire USA was our oyster. We had no family anywhere outside the Philly area, so we had no attachment to anywhere, we just wanted somewhere warm. We considered all kinds of places...Dallas, Phoenix, Tampa, Atlanta, Houston, etc... House went on the market in April, sold 3 days later. We made a few solo trips down to Atlanta for job interviews, area searching, etc... and in late June we packed up and drove to Atlanta.
3.5 years later...I miss Philly something awful, but I do NOT miss winter. Never again.
