Let me start off by saying that I am a decade or so away from moving back to Ohio, but my wife and I think it would be wise to use some of our time off between now and then to visit some places we haven’t been and narrow down the list before hopefully catching the market at a good time and purchasing our forever home.

My personal history living in Ohio includes three major stops: rural Brown County (yes, I realize that’s redundant), the suburbs outside of Youngstown, and downtown Columbus. Based on those experiences, there are some guidelines that I’d like to share so you might know what we’re looking for and help find that hidden gem of a town for us:

There was far too much rain for my tastes in Brown County, and the clay that is prevalent in the soil there meant a lot of standing water. I would like to avoid both the excessive rain and the clay if possible. It seems, based on both my experience and some maps I found (https://prism.oregonstate.edu/projects/gallery_view.php?state=OH) that the rain lessens somewhat as you move north.
The area we were in was also relatively isolated, and it was a 45 minute drive (one-way) to get to any major store chain. We’d like to be a little closer to civilization than that in retirement. We prefer white Christmases to wet ones, as well as drivers and road crews that are actually prepared for the ice when it comes. That is generally not the case in any of the counties that touch Kentucky, but I can’t say where the “good” winter drivers become more prevalent except to say it is somewhere south of Columbus and north of Cincinnati. 

While we’re on the topic of snow, Youngstown obviously has its own issues, but I’ll focus on two major sticking points here: I will gladly trade rain for snow, but I don’t want it in the volumes that come off the lake. I am also a Bengals fan, and would like to live in a part of the state where I don’t have to wonder if I’ll get to watch them on a week-to-week basis. I know it sounds silly, but it was heartbreaking to know the Bengals had such a good season this past year and that I missed so much of it due to NFL broadcast rules. That eliminates a little more than half the state from contention for me since the Northeast and greater Columbus area are definitely Browns territory.

That pretty much covers our climate preferences, but to say it more explicitly - Columbus is our Goldilocks zone. The two reasons we are not just opting to live there are the aforementioned Browns lean and the fact that our money would not buy the amount of land we would want to retire on there. We are hoping to have at least a few acres to ourselves in retirement - hopefully near enough to a highway that we wouldn’t be much more than an hour drive from the ‘Shoe.
 

All in all, that basically leaves us looking in a part of the state I know very little about, and we have a trip planned this summer to drive through a couple towns (Springfield and Troy) that fit our criteria. If anyone lives in the west of Columbus/north of Dayton area that loves or hates their town, or has recommendations or other constraints to add, please chime in!