When my husband and I moved here five years ago, we hadn’t spent much time in Palm Springs. In fact, we had only really driven through here to visit a friend of ours who lives in Rancho Mirage. Our move here was a leap of faith and it was based on a few criteria.
First, we wanted to scale back and get away from traffic and crowds. We were both approaching fifty at the time we moved from San Francisco and we found the hassle of city life to be less and less appealing. In fact, we had grown to hate it. We hated how difficult it was to just go out and socialize with friends we already had, let alone venturing out to make new friends. It was all too much and made enjoying our lives work, not play. We wanted to change that.
Second, we wanted a place that made us feel healthy. We had both lived in large cities most of our lives and the one thing we knew was how terrible city living made us feel. Between fighting crowds on the subway and sitting in traffic for hours we felt the stress was affecting our health. I won’t even mention how we felt about the cold weather. We just felt sick and tired all the time and we wanted to feel healthy at this point in our lives.
Third, we needed to find a place where we could afford to buy a home. San Francisco had become so incredibly unaffordable that there was no way we could possibly purchase a home there. And buying a home outside the city and commuting in wasn’t an option. Our situation really made us feel stuck. We knew we had to find a place of our own if we were going to build the kind of life we had dreamed of and it had to be affordable.
Palm Springs had been hit pretty hard by the downturn of the market when we started looking, so it was pretty appealing. Given that it ticked all our other boxes, we made the decision to buy. And we’re so lucky we did. In Palm Springs we found a place we feel comfortable and, for the first time in our lives, we feel like we belong here. Most importantly, we found a gay community much stronger than we had ever experienced in San Francisco. That surprised us because we didn’t really know much about the gay scene in Palm Springs when we moved here. And, frankly, it really wasn’t all that important to us at the time. After all, we had just come from one of the gayest cities in America and we left there thinking nothing could compare. We didn’t think that any town could have as many, or more, gay guys per capita and be as gay friendly as San Francisco was. But we were very wrong.
We feel like we’re a part of a community here. We socialize here more than we have in our entire lives. That’s partly due to the fact that everything is so close together and getting around is so easy. Going out is fun and not a hassle. But the main reason we socialize so much here, and the main reason we’ve made so many friends here, is that this town is one of the friendliest towns we’ve been to, let alone lived in. I think that’s because everyone else feels as good as we do living here. We honestly didn’t know a soul when we moved here and within one week we were having dinner with guys we met at the dog park. Now we have an extensive network of friends and we’re going out almost every night of the week, which was something we never did in San Francisco. Whether it’s meeting at one of the bars on Arenas like Chill Bar, Hunters, or Streetbar for happy hour or meeting friends for an early bird dinner at Lulu, Trio, or Tropicale our social calendar is booked. And we love that. We never expected to have found such a warm and welcoming gay community here and we’re so happy we took that leap of faith back in 2012. Plain and simple, Palm Springs is truly a gay mecca and we love living here.
If you’re thinking about moving to Palm Springs full-time or just thinking about purchasing a second home here, give me a call. I’d be happy to share my experience with you and guide you through the process. You’ll love this town and the people in it. What are you waiting for? Come join our town!
Posted by Geoffrey Moore on
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