I'll be happy to explain what I went through when I retired.
First off, I had lived in Pleasanton (Bay Area) for 23 years, then moved up to Folsom in Sacramento County for work reasons. I didn't sell the Pleasanton house because the market was down when I left, so I rented it out (I owned it outright) and had house payments in Folsom that were lower than the rent I was taking in. I got laid off a few years before I had planned to retire, looked for work for a while (i.e., exactly 6 months while I could collect unemployment), then came to the conclusion that I didn't want to keep working anymore. My heart was just not in it.
My wife and I spent a month or two figuring out how I could pull off being retired, and the ONLY thing that worked was to sell BOTH houses. I spent about a month getting the Folsom house ready to sell, sold it, then moved back to Pleasanton to put in my time in that house. I really liked living in Folsom, and had really liked Pleasanton too until I left there for five years. When I came back it was just too busy with rush hour being pretty much any time it was light outside. I had to live there for two years to keep from paying a hugh amount of taxes for how much more than $500K my house had appreciated since I bought it. My tax guy said that those two years were worth $158K, but the house went up more than another $100K too. I lived there for two years and one week, just to make sure the IRS couldn't claim I had come up short.
During the two years in Pleasanton, it felt like I was working half-time just fixing the place up. It needed a lot of repairs inside and out including repainting every room, replacing all floor coverings, and much more. When we had one more year to go, my wife and I made a list of six possible places to relocate, in four different states. We visited each of those areas and crossed them off one by one as we found issues with them. Folsom was on the list, but it would have cost me about $250K more than moving to Idaho would have for an equivalent home.
In the end, we chose the Boise/Meridian area south of I-84. My wife grew up in Boise, so it wasn't totally foreign, and we have friends and relatives in the area. One of the requirements for any place we chose was decent dual sport and adventure bike riding. This area was the top choice in that particular area.
For your last questions, yes, we had to make new friends, even though we had some old ones in the area, we had to find a new gym and grocery store. It's not as good regarding favorite restaurants, but we've found some we like. There is not a single Chinese restaurant in the whole valley as good as what was available in both places I lived in California, but there are better Barbecure places, and Italian, and probably Mexican too. And even though there are not as many good paved twisty roads nearby as in the Bay Area (which I believe to be true for every other place in the entire country), there are tons of great dirt roads around, and that's what I most enjoy riding on.
There you go, for what it's worth.
