Monthly living guides

One guide per destination

What is a monthly living guide?

A MidStays monthly living guide is a plain-language brief on what it is actually like to live in one destination for 29 nights to eleven months. Each guide covers the months worth targeting and the months worth avoiding, the neighborhoods people settle into, typical drive times, and what many homes in that destination offer.

A guide is not a sightseeing list. Someone here for 90 days does not need the top ten attractions — they need to know where the grocery store is, how far the drive to work or a medical facility really is, whether the neighborhood is quiet on a Tuesday night, and what the weather does in the month they arrive. Those are the questions each guide answers.

The guides are written for the four situations that fill MidStays homes: a snowbird booking November through April, someone on a 13-week healthcare contract, a consultant or engineer on a project assignment, and a family placed in a home after their own became unlivable. Each guide flags what suits which.

And each guide names at least one real drawback. Phoenix and the California low desert are brutal from June through September. Flagstaff, the White Mountains, Idyllwild and Lake Arrowhead get genuine winter snow and icy roads. The California coast can stay gray and cool right through June. Better to read that now than discover it in week two.