FindYourSpot.com and BestPlaces.net purport to help you find the retirement or second-home location that best suits your preferences. These are good resources as far as they go, which is to say they go about as far as they can without any human involvement.
Both sites take you through a step-by-step questionnaire that covers all the important categories you will consider when looking for a city or town. Most of the usual suspects are there: cost of living, crime, climate, housing values, transportation, religion and schools. FindYourSpot includes more specific additional questions about recreational and cultural issues.
Flaws are abundant. For example, when you plug in the name of the city you are considering (or its zip code) and then search BestPlaces’ transportation category, you get data for the city compared against the U.S. average, which strikes us as pretty much irrelevant. And do we care as much about average commute time (included) as we do, say, the distance to the nearest commercial airport? There is no mention of the latter at BestPlaces. In the education category, should we care as much about the number of students for each librarian as we do about the number of continuing education courses that are offered in the area?
Although BestPlaces asks you to indicate your preferences, we prefer FindYourSpot 's more peronal approach (a little humor here and there). It asks a longer list of questions than does BestPlaces and produces a longer list of towns that FindYourSpot thinks are right for you.
It makes for some fairly bizarre results, and shows that these services lack a whole lot of nuance. My wife and I separately filled out the FindYourSpot questionnaire. We both enjoy our second home on the South Carolina coast, and our responses reflected that (we thought), although my responses indicated I would enjoy living in the mountains as well. I emphasized golf, continuing education, access to an airport and the desire for culture and entertainment activities nearby. My wife, besides stressing a coastal location with an emphasis on access to beaches, highlighted an interest in museums and orchestras, as well as access to an airport, continuing ed and many of the things I stressed. She is not a golfer and ranked it way lower than I did.
Her top results: New York City, Boston and San Francisco. Mine: Two towns in the Texas Hill Country and one in rural Louisiana. We’ve had a good chuckle over what might be a compromise location, and who might get the kids.
You won’t make any decisions on where to live based on these sites, but a few minutes on either one might give you something to talk about.
Golf Course Review
Until recently, I had never heard of the University of the South at Sewanee in Tennessee, let alone that it had a well-regarded nine hole golf course. But the prodigal son was granted admission to the school after the recommendation to apply by his college counselor, and so we thought we should take a look, He insisted on bringing his clubs, albeit for one day. He had read that the university owned Sewanee Golf Club was a quirky classic.
The course is about 50 years old, a nine hole track featured in the new book "To the Nines" by Anthony Prioppi that features the best half courses in the land. Sewanee Golf Club is proof positive that a course does not need an abundance of hazards -- water or sand -- to make it challenging and fun. We counted a half dozen or so traps and a lake that was more window dressing than hazard. The land is the thing at Sewanee, whose terrain swoops and swerves; and although the uncut greens were reading somewhere around 20 on the stimpmeter, we still needed to be careful when we were above the hole, such was the severe sloping. Short yardage holes were more than compensated by quirky green complexes. Our favorite, in a perverse way, was the 159 yard par 3 4th (which also played to 164 as the 13th; Sewanee moves the tees around on the second nine); it had easily the smallest width to length ratio of any green we have played. At its widest, the green measured about 25 feet, with a sand bunker guarding the first half of the left side. The green ran front to back at least 100 feet, and behind it was a neat view of the Cumberland Valley below. (I'll post a photo of the green when I return home).
Sewanee Golf Club is minimalist in more than its number of holes. The pro shop is spare and multi-purpose; the same person who sells you a hat or sleeve of golf balls will also fetch you a hot dog. I had decided to leave my clubs at home in a not-so-coy attempt to duck a round of golf in 40-degree weather. I asked benignly about rental clubs, and the young lady behind the counter told me,"Sir, we don't rent clubs, we loan them" at no charge. She sent me around the corner to take my pick of the dozen available sets, a collection so motley that it made my few hairs hurt. I chose a bag quickly -- too quickly -- and learned later that I had two pitching wedges, two nine irons -- one left handed -- and a five wood with a head smaller than the hybrid I left at home. I had no sand wedge, no six or eight irons. This was also the first time I hit a wooden club, the driver, in more than 20 years. I guess this is known as golf the way it is meant to be played, old clubs on an old style course. I was pleased I broke 90, with an 88. Tim mixed a few double bogies with a few birdies and scored a nice 75. His length off the tee helped a lot on the 6,100 layout. A modern, matched set of clubs didn't hurt either.
You won't find any houses on Sewanee Golf Club, but prices in the area bespeak the town's distance from any city of consequence (90 minutes from Nashville, 60 from Chattanooga). We smiled to see an almost 1,000 square foot house near the college listed at under $100,000. We didn't think any of those were left anywhere in the land. The town is all university; that is, the university owns all 10,000 acres in the town, the second largest "campus" in the nation. Professors attend classes in robes (the academic kind, not terry cloth) and most students still adhere to the tradition of natty attire in class (coat and tie for men, dresses for the young ladies). Some might say college the way it was meant to be played.
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March 2024
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