Those who read my free monthly newsletter, Home On The Course, and Golf Community Reviews know I am not a big fan of those web sites and magazines that rank the best places to live or retire. Such rankings range from those that are biased toward their advertisers to those that are coy about the criteria that help produce their lists. One site I recently discovered, Niche.com, is forthcoming about the criteria it uses and, in so doing, does a service to retirees who may be inclined to take too seriously the “best of” ratings, even Niche’s own.
        Niche is a site worth exploring. It is comprehensive and fun to dabble with and, taken with a grain of salt, is a decent source of information about places to live. I took it for a test drive by clicking on its “Best Counties to Retire” list and was surprised to note that the top 14 on the list were all Florida counties. (Beaufort County, SC, broke the schneid at #15.)
        That tilt toward the Sunshine State led me to explore the criteria Niche used to develop its rankings. I was pleased that the site was direct not only in detailing its 16 criteria but also in sharing the weightings they used.
        But therein lies a problem. You would think that a site advising retirees on the best place to live might assign weighting to the criteria most important to retirees. But the highest weighted criteria, at 15%, is a something called “Retiree Newcomers,” described as, “The percent of residents 65 years old and over, who moved into the area within the last year.” That is not something relocating retirees care about. I can say honestly in the 15 years I have worked with retirees and others to find their “best” places to live, no one has ever said to me, “We want to move where most retirees are moving.” If you are like me, the last thing you want to hear from a salesperson, for example, is, “That is one of our most popular items.” Popularity does not confer wisdom of choice. Niche stacks the deck in favor of Florida right off the bat.
        The second most heavily weighted category, at 12.5%, is “cost of living,” a criterion that most retirees looking to relocate indicate in their top three. Niche’s sources for COL data is “consumer price index and access to affordable housing.” Niche is quite forthcoming with additional details about how the site determines cost of living, but I won’t burden this discussion with the particulars. Suffice to say that many sources available to all of us on the Internet proclaim South Carolina and Georgia, for example, as overall less expensive places to live than Florida. (Yes, I know, Florida does not have a state income tax, but the other taxes – property, sales, tolls on highways that aren’t bumper to bumper – more than compensate.) 
        Niche weights equally, at 10%. the three categories of average sunny days per year, crime and safety, and the number of residents over 65. To the extent that sunny days equal nice climate, Niche is calculating a criterion that relocating retirees put at or near the tops of their lists of requirements; after all, what refugee from the cold winters of the north would want to relocate someplace other than the “Sun” belt? But sunny days in Florida do not tell the entire story of climate, especially in July and August when temperatures are relentlessly high and sun gives way to almost daily thunderstorms. And need we mention the threat of hurricanes, a factor utterly ignored by using sunny days as the criterion for “climate?”
        And what is with weighting relatively heavily the category “residents over 65”? That certainly seems like gilding the lily after giving the highest weighting to “Retiree Newcomers.” Combine the two and the effect of old people in Florida – I can say that, I am 72 – accounts for 25% of Niche’s scoring. 
        That is like an ad proclaiming, "Come to Florida. We really are God’s Waiting Room."

        My first visit to the Balcomie Links at the Crail Golfing Society was magical, and it started even before my first tee shot. Standing on the tiny practice green with my son Tim, a collegiate golfer at the time, overlooking the North Sea and much of the golf course from its highest point, I heard my son’s name called. Here we are 5,000 miles from our Connecticut home, and Tim introduces me to a young Scottish lad against whom he had competed in a college tournament in Virginia. It was pure kismet that they both were at Balcomie on the same day at the same time.
CrailBalcomiedogleg5Long Way Around: The 5th hole on Balcomie Links is a par 4 of 437 yards -- on a front nine that measures less than 3,000 yards. And the wind is always blowing, typically in your face.
        From there, the magic continued for my first round on a true links course. Yeah, I had played what I thought were links courses, like the Ocean Course at Kiawah and Shinnecock Hills but, no, this was an entirely different experience. I won’t belabor my opinions about Crail’s two courses – the other is a more modern links course by Gil Hanse opened in the ‘90s but with strong nods to classic architecture – but suffice to say the experience is unique, given that all 36 holes feature at least one view of the North Sea, quite possibly the only place on earth where that is the case. Other elements such as blind shots and double greens and walls in fairways and behind greens are not unique, but blended together into one beautiful package…maybe. (I reviewed the course here in 2008)
        I was so smitten with Crail, including the charming coastal town right out of a picture postcard or jigsaw puzzle – I own the latter – that I signed up as an overseas member knowing full well that during some years, especially those smitten by something called coronavirus, I would not be playing there. But, heck, it is less than $200 annually, and it gives me something to dream about. And that is a small price to pay for great memories and dreams.
        I didn’t want to let today pass without a special shout out to Balcomie Links, designed by Old Tom Morris and 125 years old today. Beatha Fhada. Long life.

Balcomie practice green 1M best view ever from a practice green, at Crail Golfing Society