I was born & raised in SoCal & moved to the Seattle area at age 27 & lived & worked there for the next 29 years. A friend of mine moved to Tucson in 1993 & I came down to visit her on vacation in 2001 & was enchanted with how pretty it was & how it was quite unlike what I'd thought a desert "should" look like. It's green & lush with mountains all around that you can actually see most of the time, unlike WA! The Sonoran Desert is a really interesting desert & extends down into Mexico.
I decided that I'd like to move to Tucson when I retired. I wanted to live in a place that was in close proximity to all the services I needed & as a single female, I didn't want to live out in the sticker bushes & have to drive a long way to get groceries or see a dr. or dentist. I bought a Tucson Thomas Guide map book (do they ever still make those?) & looked up everything I thought I'd be interested in (hospitals, stores, attractions, anything, even Costcos) online & plotted the locations on the maps in the book & decided the NW side of Tucson was the spot to look for a place.
I put my house in WA up for sale & my realtor put me in touch with a realtor down here, who was also a WA transplant. I came down to look at houses on Super Bowl weekend of 2006, knowing I needed to get something pronto since my house in WA had just sold a couple of days before. I found a house I liked & put in an offer & my realtor called while I was waiting at Tucson Int'l Airport for my flight back to Seattle to tell me my offer had been accepted. I went back to work the next day & put in my papers to retire & moved in April 2006.
I'm on the NW side of Tucson, near Marana & I like that pretty much everything I need is within a 5 mile radius of my house. This area has grown even since I've been here & is continuing to grow.
I've now been here nearly 14 years & I've adjusted to the heat better than I thought I would. If you'd told me 40 years ago that I'd someday be living in SE AZ, I wouldn't have believed you! The winter is my favorite time of year, but I love the monsoon, too. It's so cool to have a day start out how & clear & the heat builds up in the humidity & big thunder clouds form before your eyes & then, thunder, lightning & torrential rain that cools everything back off beautifully & the smell of the desert when it rains is so wonderful.
As for critters, I've never had a scorpion in my house, but have found a couple outside & in my garage. If you keep bugs like roaches & crickets out of your house, the scorpions have no reason to be in your house, since those things are what they feed on . I've had a few tarantulas in my yard too. I've seen a couple of rattlers, but I'm careful where I step & don't stick my hands where I can't see into like under bushes. I've had javalina & coyotes in my yard & my neighbor told me she had a bobcat on her back wall, but I haven't seen one except at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum.
Gosh, I've practically written a novel here!
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