Not sure how to sample the area. Would living there a couple of weeks in January and agin in July do the trick?
Are you able to go for say…a month? Rent a VRBO or Airbnb for a month. i think a couple of weeks is too much like a vacation. I think 4-6 weeks would give you a better sense of living there. A house or condo…where you cook, etc…would be more like living there than a hotel.
We’ve lived in Arizona for about 15 years. spent time living in both Phoenix and Tucson. There’s a lot of various pros & cons for different areas in Arizona. Here are my thoughts in no particular order:
- FLAGSTAFF:
- college town
- high elevation - something like 8000 ft
- not a good place to live if you don't want snow in the winter
- pretty liberal
- known for not-so-affordable housing in the state
SEDONA:
- tourist town
- most people visit first and then decide to move there
- really really hard to find employment. Most locals who are not retired have to work multiple part time jobs to make ends meet
- pretty bohemian
- gorgeous scenery, wonderful outdoor sports options
PRESCOTT:
- locals pronounce it “Pres-kit” not “Pres-cott”
- lots of people who have lived in Phoenix their whole lives decide to retire to Prescott
- small town
** If you need major medical treatments (i.e., major surgery, cancer treatments, etc.), then Flagstaff, Sedona and Prescott are NOT the places to be. You’ll need to travel to Phoenix for that. The regional hospitals are pretty limited in terms of the type & quality of services provided.
PHOENIX:
- hot as a mother trucker in June & July. 107 - 116 pretty regularly
- June & July is when a lot of Phoenix locals escape to the mountains on weekends.
- easy proximity to good medical, major airport, lots of options in terms of outdoorsy stuff to do, social events
- if you’re into big professional sports, there’s an NFL team, a NHL team, and an NBA team.
- if you’re a baseball fan, you can attend spring training games to your heart’s desire all over the Phoenix metro area.
- by the end of September, you’ll be begging for summer to end.
- planting seasons are all reversed. Nobody plants anything in the summer. Everything hibernates in the summer. It all grows in fall, winter, and spring instead.
- definitely a very “red” part of the state politically
- lots of snowbirds who show up in October and are usually gone in April
TUCSON:
- temps usually about 5 degrees cooler than Phoenix
- slightly higher elevation than Phoenix
- politically, it’s deep deep blue. Tucson is kind of like the Berkeley of Arizona, but its suburbs (Oro Valley, Marana, Sahuarita, Vail) are red.
- beautiful scenery & lots of cool stuff to do all around town
- hard to find a decent job. Wages are lower than in Phoenix. Housing prices are lower, too.
- snowbirds usually here October - early May
- medical care is ok. If you have to see a doctor associated with Banner Health in Tucson, it’s impossible to get an appointment.
- options in Tucson for certain medical specialties are very limited, with those doctors often having no available appointments for new patients for 3 month or more (sometimes it’s 9 months to get a new appointment).
I forgot to add:
About Tucson…
The road system here in Tucson is impossible. The county & local government has not maintained the roads very well at all. There’s only 1 freeway and most of Tucson is to the east of I-10. As a result, it can take 45 min on surface streets to get across town.
About Phoenix…
It has a good network of freeways with no toll roads and yes, you do not need a special HOV lane transponder for your car in order to use the HOV lane. BUT drivers in Phoenix tailgate something fierce. And, generally speaking, they drive like bats out of hell. 15 mph over the speed limit and still tailgating you. Roads all over Phoenix area well maintained. There is regular freeway maintenance, but it involves them shutting down sections of the freeway for the whole weekend and that is a pain in the neck sometimes…but I’d take that over the Tucson roads any day of the week.
I could try a month in July. Right now the only time I see a doctor is when I get annual checkup although it may change in the future.
A month is enough to get an idea. It really doesn’t bother me on any given day but by September I’m ready for cooler weather. But, cooler weather has a different definition. 90 degrees in AZ is comparable to 80 in the East with humidity. I’ve lived with both. And there is a 20-30 degree temperature swing daily so a high of 90 is usually a low of 60-65 for nice mornings.
Evenings are still hot in the summer, often over 100 until near midnight but that is not northern AZ. Elevation matters.
Some snowbirds will rent their homes in the summer, many in 50 and up communities with all the bells and whistles as far as activities go. In Phoenix, personally I prefer the West Valley, you may look to rent something in the Surprise area. There are several Del Webb communities there, the Sun City Grand being just one of them with about 10,000 homes in that development alone. Plenty of health care in the area due to the % of retirees. Personally, the summer temps don’t bother me much, I can tolerate 110 degrees much better than 90 with humidity. Tusconmom is correct about the drivers, they can give Massholes a run for their money for tailgating.
Igloo, my D3 is in Prescott. She says it’s about 10 degrees cooler in Flagstaff which is about an hour away. Prescott is at 5000 ft or so and many places don’t have air conditioning. It will hit 90 in the summer but cool off considerably at night. Which means it’s cold at night by October. She went to a pumpkin patch and corn maze today so they still manage to have those.
I met a woman on the airport shuttle once who visited Embry Riddle there with her son and came back and bought a house in Chino Valley (kid went somewhere else). She kept her house in San Diego and goes back every 3 months or so, including doctor visits, because it is so easy. Her husband’s asthma disappeared in northern Arizona.
And then there’s…
YUMA!
Our next door neighbors retired to Tucson after living in Yuma for 25-30 years. The husband next door was in the Marines for ages. He said that the summers in Yuma are brutal. I believe him especially after driving through Yuma on many a summer’s day on drives out to San Diego. It has the high temps of Tucson and Phoenix but because of all of the agriculture in the area, the humidity is much higher. This means that when it’s 108, it will feel hotter than 108. It’s pretty awful.
Yuma is very popular for snowbirds with RVs. There are miles upon miles of RV parks in Yuma which are packed in the cooler months of the year. There’s not much to do in Yuma. A lot of retirees in Yuma cross the border into Mexico for dental care and sometimes medical care as well. In the last 10 years, there is a ton more shopping in Yuma than there used to be. Starting around mid-November through Christmas, the local shopping areas in Yuma are full of upper middle class citizens from Mexico doing their annual Christmas shopping. This also happens a lot in Tucson. Mexican citizens are allowed to travel in the US within a certain # of miles of the US-Mexico border and they can do so without a visa or passport (I can’t remember which). They literally spend millions of dollars in the US and the Yuma and Tucson economies get a lot of tax revenue from it because sometimes, the families will stay for a week, stay in local hotels, etc., etc. sometimes you’ll see big tour buses from Mexico full of people shopping at the local outlet malls. So if you see a lot of Mexican license plates from Sonora Mexico around that time of year, that’s why. It’s far cheaper for them to come to the US to buy American goods than to buy them in Mexico (because the Mexican government adds a lot of taxes to products imported from the US).
There’s also…
QUARTZSITE!
It’s a miserable stretch of ugly desert on I-10 between Phoenix and LA. For 3 months in the winter, its local population soars into the tens of thousands and a gazzillion RVs and trailers show up. Quartzsite has a rock & mineral show there that lasts for almost a month in something like January/February. Lots of retirees go there every year and they love it because they meet up with friends and basically camp out in the desert for a couple of months. The local McDonald’s turns into the community center and it’s not unusual to have retirees hanging out and playing guitars and singing in McDonald’s. Lines at the post office to get your mail can be an hour long in the winter. There was a whole episode once of “The Desert Speaks” on PBS about it. It was fascinating. But I wouldn’t recommend living there. It’s an ok place to stop for a few min to get gas, go to the bathroom, grab a soda, but that’s about it.
if you’re serious about wanting to move to Arizona and you are considering Phoenix or Tucson, I would recommend to spend a week in the hottest part of the summer in either of those cities. After living here for about 15 yr, I’d say that the most miserable month is June. Monsoon season hasn’t started yet and usually June is full of days above 105 degrees. And often 5-6 days in a row about 110. Seriously, it sometimes seems like the 7th circle of hell in June.
Of course, it would be best to stay for a month, but most people can’t take a whole month off of work, so settle on a week.
What you will notice in the summer in Phoenix and Tucson is that people hibernate. In cold weather climates, people hibernate in the winter. In the hot parts of Arizona, we hibernate in the summer. Everybody exercises at 5:00 am or at 8:00 pm when it’s not absolutely horrible.
It is normal in the summer, especially in Phoenix, for it to be 90 degrees by 8 am. Between 5-6:30 am, it’s tolerable and actually pleasant. That’s when people do stuff outside. That’s when retirees go to the grocery store. Once the sun goes down, the temp usually goes down, too. Well, in Tucson it does…not so much in Phoenix. In Phoenix, you easily could see it still 95 degrees at 11 pm.
But I’ll tell you something…90 degrees at 15% humidity feels like 80 degrees. When it gets to 80 degrees, people start putting on sweatshirts here. But we still have our flip flops on.
Local customs in the church-going crowd in Phoenix and Tucson include wearing nice shorts or capri pants to church with nicer flip flops or sandals. You can forget about wearing a suit and tie to church. Men will tend to wear khaki pants or dress shorts and a nice polo shirt in the summer.
Winter here lasts about 6 weeks. Tucson usually gets a dusting of snow about every other year. Snow hardly ever happens in Phoenix. Tucsonans do have to worry about pipes freezing in the winter, especially if there are 2 or more days in a row of a hard freeze warning. Older homes in Tucson tend to have more problems with frozen pipes than newer construction. In Phoenix, you don’t really ever have to worry about that.
Pima County (where Tucson is located) has a city ordinance which prohibits street lights because of the solar observatory on the top of Mt. Lemmon. By the way, it’s open to the public for tours. Tours cost about $65 a person. So at night, it’s REALLY DARK! But the skies are so beautiful and amazing.
If you are an avid golfer, than Phoenix would probably be preferable to Tucson. Phoenix has way more golf courses than Tucson.
Tucson is really big with bicyclists…road bikers and mountain bikers. There are some really great mountain biking trails around the Tucson metro area.
Both Phoenix and Tucson have really great hiking close by.
In Tucson, you are more likely to have close encounters with wildlife than in Phoenix. Javelinas, coyotes, huge lizards, deer, bobcats have all been observed in our neighborhood.
If you decide to spend a week in Phoenix, you should go visit their desert botanical garden. It’s a wonderful place and it will give you some great examples of how gorgeous and wonderful your desert oasis backyard could be. Tucson has a couple as well…there’s the Desert Museum and Tohono Chul Park (which is on the northwest side of town).
If you go visit Tucson, you should check out the Titan Missile Museum in Green Valley (it’s about 30 min from the Tucson airport). One of the Star Trek movies was filmed there. Green Valley is a huge retirement community in Tucson that’s near Sahuarita. Green Valley has a really great community center and a vibrant & very active social scene for retirees.
As a side note, Google Sun City AZ seniors STD’s, It is quite startling the rate in these retiree communities. The only thing I can guess is that “they” don’t think “it” happens to them.
I kid you not, the wine and beer bar in the Frys Grocery store in the Sun City West is full all the time, 10 am till 7 pm. People grocery shop, then drink and socialize. I have personally overheard some pretty raucous conversations there from people you would think are just normal grandparents. I’m not kidding when I say I have overheard things that make me blush…and that takes a lot!
Retirement ain’t what it used to be!
@tucsonmom, great and very accurate info for the OP.
I am thinking near a national park like Moab. Amenities will be lacking, no 55+ community, not much culture, no big hospitals.
If you spend a week in Phoenix…go to the MIM (Musical Instrument Museum). It’s absolutely awesome…and a good thing to do on a hot summer day!
Igloo, then spend part of your July trial near that national park town. It could be crazy with tourists and tour busses if it’s a popular park. We were in Estes Park over the summer and they have regular traffic cops out every day because it’s so crowded. Near Zion will likely be just as bad.
Also, the Grand Canyon is a big detour. People living in the strip of AZ above it have to travel through Nevada to head further south. I believe they call it “the slot”. The area has more in common with Utah and one of the Bundy people who was killed in Oregon lived there.
If you’re near Moab, you won’t be far from Grand Junction and Colorado’s wine country.
About tourists around Moab or similar area, I wonder how much it would bother me. If the town is quiet the rest of the year, I may welcome them a bit. New Mexico is also close to Moab.
Oddly enough, W and I actually moved to Phoenix after spending a long July 4 weekend in N Scottsdale when it was a record 117F! We were living in the SF Bay Area at the time and a few years later wanted to move somewhere cheaper and remembered how much we liked the area.
I think all the suggestions to visit for a week or month during the hottest part of the year are a little silly, honestly. If you’re considering moving to Chicago you don’t go for a visit in Feb, or Florida during hurricane season, or Alaska in the dead of winter. You move to an area for the good reasons, not the bad, so you should try to experience those good things.
In summer we hibernate, as others have said. It’s essentially a reverse winter, minus the snow, salt, boots, heavy coats, hats, gloves, sleet, and slipping and falling. Work still gets done and people still run around, you just move from one a/c environment to another. And people dress in a way that would make prudes over on all those “appropriate wear in public” threads shake their heads 
Visit during October - May when the weather is clear and sunny and people are running around in t-shirts and shorts generally having fun. Experience the good things about why people like an area, not the bad.
I was in the area already. Liked it. A lot. After being in nature for a week, coming home was a huge let down, fussing over trivia, petty bourgeois culture.
Northern AZ? Like Flagstaff or like Page? Tuba City? I’d advise against Fredonia & Colorado City!
Southern Utah, like Kanab? St George?
Perhaps a bit more detail about what you are thinking?
Close enough to the cool nature stuff to drive or to be right there?