Moving to Cupertino

One decision retired people need to make is where to live in their retirement years.  For many people, staying in their family home has many advantages — a familiar, much-loved home with a paid-off mortgage, friends of long standing living nearby.  For others more adventurous, the freedom to pursue their lifelong dream of living in Florida, on a yacht, or overseas is the special draw.  For me and my husband, the overriding factor was to be close to our children.

Sending your children to the best schools they can get into and that you can afford has its consequences — you wake up one day and find they are all over the country and you have not lived together since they were 18.  I have a special theory that you cannot really know your children well until you know them well as adults, and my Grand Plan was to know my children well.

My husband and I raised our three children in Holmdel, New Jersey, home of the Bell Laboratories where my husband and, later, I worked.  In 2002, we moved to Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where my oldest son, Dave, and his wife, Elena, lived with their two daughters.  Given the difference in house prices in an affluent New Jersey suburb versus in Central Pennsylvania, we were able to build a dream house within half a mile of my son’s house.  We lived there in Phase One of our Grand Plan until 2010 and watched our two granddaughters morph from cute toddlers to tall, lanky teenagers who tower over us.  We went from helping them with babysitting and making dinners for them to being invited to dinners and having my son and daughter-in-law, both physicians, help manage our health problems.

In 2010, we decided it was time to move from Pennsylvania to California to be near our second child, Martha. Martha, a busy, dedicated oncologist and her husband, Andy, a co-founder of a Silicon Valley start-up, are parents of an energetic two-year old boy.  From many visits to this area, we settled on Cupertino as a place we want to be, and not just Cupertino, but we pinpointed the exact location where we wanted to live.

My husband and I have lived most of our married life in suburbs — green, spacious, lots of lawn and trees, and a swimming pool.  But now, we elected to live in downtown Cupertino, at the intersection of two busy streets — Stevens Creek Boulevard and De Anza Avenue.

The advantages, we surmised, are that we could walk to everywhere we are likely to want to go.  We would be within one to two miles of Le Boulanger, Target, Marina Food, Lee’s Sandwiches, Whole Foods, the Cupertino Senior Center, Trader Joe’s, and the Cupertino Library.

Before we left for California on December 1, 2010, we winterized our house for the cold Pennsylvania winter, turned it over to our realtor, and made on offer, sight unseen, on a condo in the Montebello building at Stevens Creek and De Anza.  This time the price differential between our old and new homes worked against us, and we traded our spacious four bedroom home for a condo half the size at twice the price.  But we were excited to begin Phase Two of our Grand Plan.