
Which big French city?
No, we’re not about to move. Even after 6 years, Carcassonne still has what we were looking for when we were deciding on a place to live and it continues to get better. On our “must-have” spreadsheet that put 16 cities to the test, we found everything here except a water view, and that may have been a wise choice after all. (Another blog post will provide insight into that rising question.) Having lived in four of the biggest cities in the US—including numbers 2 and 3— we wanted our retirement location to have more of a village feel. While countless villages do indeed exist with colorful flowers cascading from window boxes outside blue shuttered windows in honey-colored stone houses set between cobble-stoned streets and babbling brooks, most of them are in rural locations (like this featured photo of Le Bec-Hellouin–sorry, not our house) requiring the one thing that we did not want: a car. We are grateful to have found a smaller city where we can walk to everything we need within a few minutes or ride a bus (15 € per year) anywhere else in town. However, lots of people are still looking for the buzz that you can only get in huge population centers so when I saw an article where the residents of this country’s 20 largest cities talk about what makes their home “best” I wanted to see why and who would come out on top.
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