Now let me tell you about Wisconsin. 6 month winter then hot in summer and road construction. I think this is a great place to retire.
Here, here. Property taxes are also less in WA, as is the cost of the property itself.
There are a couple of pretty good public transit companies: Tri-Met in Portland and C-Tran in Vancouver. They even honor each other’s all zone tickets and passes. A C-Tran all zone senior pass is $30 a month.
Over the summer there is one beer festival or another almost every week.
Bloomington is looking better by the day. My wife wants to retire in Florida, but I dislike hot and humid weather more than I dislike cold weather.
I’m with you,Mark. I couldn’t live in a climate like that either.
Yeah, elbow room. Post more pictures from your place with critters and volcanic mountains in the background. Then a picture of what defines elbow room. ;D
I hate cold weather. Give me the Gulf Coast any day. I love visiting other places, but I can’t imagine retiring anywhere else.
I would absolutely retire in Wisconsin! Somewhere in the driftless zone, and another place in Ashville NC, or thereabouts. That is my dream.
Mark, Bloomington IN is a great town. Very pretty, and lovely people. 2nd best campus in the Big 10. 
Indianapolis and Chicago are not far away for big city events, and the cost of living is very good. Madison, WI would be high on my list as well. For the same reasons as Bloomington.
I don’t think there is a computer engineering department at IU. You may need to check into West Lafayette.
In addition to lecturing, check into jobs at research centers on campus. They often need skilled engineers for ongoing projects.
When you consider a school, cold call the department head, chair, or center director. Just applying through a website is rolling the dice. Hard to stand out.
IU offers computer science courses.
Its hard to imagine for me moving away from all my friends and family when I’m in my sixties. I guess if you were extremely extroverted and are just friends with whoever you meet or so introverted that you don’t want to be with other people it would make sense. Also New England is kind of in my bones. The other thing for me is I kind of look forward to enjoying all the hard work I put into my home and land when I retire. I can’t wait to have all that time to garden and homebrew.
My girlfriend on the other hand is sick of the winters. I think if we moved someplace warm, since we would be massively uprooting anyway, I would move to Italy or Spain so it would be an adventure then move back home when we start not being able to fully take care of ourselves.
+1. IIRC their computer science program is considered top 10 in the country.
If you are willing to move to the more remote areas of Italy you can pick up a “fixer upper” house for less than $20k as long as you are willing to spend another $30-70k to repair it. We looked at it, but most of the places are pretty remote and many of the towns which have that housing are sparsely populated. Here’s a taste:
http://www.italianhousesforsale.com/search/properties/?category=&keyword=&type=&price_from=&price_to=100000&bed=&bath=&id=&order=desc
I have always thought this was cool. Some are without plumbing and electricity, getting that situated would be $$$
Too bad you ruled out the Southeast. Bluffton is one of the top 5 places to move , and a top place to retire.
Not Oregon…you wouldn’t like it here…nobody does…I highly recommend that no one else move here…
Let me add…Not Oregon. It rains all the time, when the big one comes the whole damn state is going to slip away, and if you think Portland is weird you obviously haven’t visited the rest of the state. (How’d I do Denny?)
You guys forgot to mention the impending beer shortage… in Oregon.
I lived in Italy when I was younger. Visiting Italy is one thing. Living there is a completely different experience.
Even the wimpiest computer science department usually offers computer organization and/or computer architecture. I used to teach computer organization as adjunct faculty. My students hated me until a couple of years after they sat through my course. They were expecting a glorified assembly language course that was more of a survey of commercially available processors. I started with half adders and moved on to sequenced sum-of-products and product-of-sums combinational logic before working them out on register transfer and micro-operations logic and the design of hard-wired and microcoded control units. I never heard so much grumbling in my life. However, as much as they loathed my very existence while taking that course, many of those who stuck with the course later wrote thanking me for giving them a competitive edge over software-only computer scientists. Many went on to work in embedded systems and ASIC design, which are generally not the province of computer scientists.
If I decide to work part-time after I retire, I definitely plan to contact the department head, or at least a major rainmaking principle investigator.