North Idaho, CdA area.
Why?
Uh, well, there's a story . . .
Born east coast. Can't tell you much about that.
Early memories begin in Ohio. Trailer park, then a small farm. It was the early fifties. We went to school in Danville, which was a long-ish bus ride.
Around age seven, we sell the farm, buy an old school bus, convert to mobile hovel, complete with wood & coal burning stove for cooking & heating. Move to Alabama. Dad bides his time until he lands job at Redstone Arsenal, home of the Atlas rocket.
Around age nine, we follow Dad's career west. He works at Aerojet General, home of the Saturn rocket, putting dudes into space. However, even though it's a bunch closer, my parents elect not to move us to Sacramento, but instead to park the family in a little Sierra Nevada foothills town, Placerville, where we will spend the next nine years in a very outdoors-friendly community, with orchards, mountains, hunting, fishing, and all that.
My dad commutes fifty miles each way for nine years so that we can grow up in a small town rather than a metro area. Like any other kid, I completely have no grasp of the sacrifices my parents make for that child rearing environment. It will gradually dawn on me, but I will be in my fifties before it registers.
After I graduated, and the space program cutbacks began, we moved to Tucson, but I wasn't there long. We will skip forward over the Air Force years and the decade of overseas volunteer work, and resume with parachuting into Las Vegas in the early eighties.
New career, new town and, after a couple of years, new wife.
Twenty years later . . . work takes us to Phoenix for a couple of years, then back to Vegas. It doesn't take long for us to wonder to one another, "what are we still doing here?"
And we move north (and west, as it happens -- did you know that Reno is west of Los Angeles?). Carson City, commuting to Reno, for another four years.
We figured we were done moving.
Carson City is acceptably rural, the region is gun-friendly, it has a hunting/fishing/outdoor culture, and it is situated in a seriously gorgeous place. Half hour from Tahoe. Four real seasons. Mild winters, but a short drive from hard core skiing. What's not to love?
Well, we took a vacation, finally, and visited a buddy of mine with whom I had worked in Vegas but who was now living 35 miles from the Canadian border. We drove around Bonners Ferry, Sandpoint, Coeur d'Alene , Post Falls, and the Panhandle area, and we came to a conclusion: we agreed that, in the unlikely event we ever had to move again, this would be the place.
You know, sometimes you have to be careful what thoughts you cast loose in the universe . . .
A year and a half later, events had conspired to make it necessary for us to move.
And here we are.
We live in an area that is, seriously, all about the outdoors. We live among communities of people who are unwitting "preppers" -- survivalists if you prefer -- but who don't actually realize that their culture is a survival/prepper thing. It's just how they live. We've got significant populations of Mormons and Mennonites up here, and I'm totally fine with that. One bunch is all about being prepared, the other is all about living off the land.
The "Aryan Nation" crowd are long gone, and the folks here are surprisingly "normal," using the same measuring stick I would have used in my youth.
(Kind of a funny aside: when we came up here the first time, we were doing some window shopping for property up around Bonners Ferry, and one of the homes we looked at was being sold by the Mennonite family who had lived in it for years and years. I asked them why they were moving, after all, I said, they had ten acres that was ten miles out of town, with the nearest neighbors a half mile in one direction, and nearly a mile in the other. Their reply? "It's too crowded here; we're moving to Montana where we can have more room." Because, you know, ten miles to town and more than a half mile to your neighbors is way too cramped. Oh -- in a couple of the Mennonite homes we toured, there were rifles just kind of stood behind the door, leaning against the wall. 'Cuz, well, you might need one. I grew up with that; kinda never expected that I would ever see "casual guns" again.)
I keep my annual membership in the local (Fernan) shooting club up to date, even though finances and work have kept me off the range for more than a year.
I commute 35 miles each way. I am frequently asked why I don't just move to Spokane. I don't generally give a complete answer, and nobody I know in Idaho ever asks that question.
So, why?
Because it's gorgeous here, it's not the "big city," and I'm surrounded by self-sufficient people who, in the main, value gun ownership and gun rights as much as I do.