Thank you dundercoder for sharing your experiences, would be very interested in the adaptations you made to your working environment as your eyesight failed. It also got me thinking about my own locale, and I would agree with volkl48. I live in Walla Walla, WA now, which has three colleges and a very walkable downtown. Sounds like you have kids, and we have reasonable public schools. It's a 45 minute flight to Seattle. There is a public bus system that covers much of the area; surprising for a US city of only 30,000 people. Really though you can cover the entire downtown area on foot. Sounds like as a suburbanite it might be more your speed over a metro area.