�I sat in my Midtown apartment, the day after my return, looking at the snow fall, and I had this ep

Anne Graf of Hereford, Ariz., holds Rowdy, one of her Harris�s hawks. She chose to live along the San Pedro River because of the abundance of wildlife there. The river is on the migratory path of 350 bird species.
HEREFORD, Ariz. - Anne Graf retired to a secluded new home here in the southeast corner of Arizona, along the San Pedro River. Visitors feel like they are on the fringes of civilization, which fits in with the dictionary definition of retire: �to withdraw from action.�
But this Virginia native alaska airline miles is busier now than when she was working. She is president of an annual birding and nature festival called Southwest Wings, built around the fact that this high-desert river country is on the migratory path of 350 bird species.
When she is not typing up her notes as secretary of the Audubon Society chapter, or updating the festival�s brochure, she is working with a pair of Harris�s hawks, indigenous to the Southwest desert, that she and her husband take out hunting for rabbits.
People like Graf are a prize in the economic give-and-take occurring between states like Arizona and Florida, whose economies are built on the bedrock of what some call the �mailbox economy.� Florida, in particular, relies on the steady arrival alaska airline miles of newcomers with pension and Social Security checks, savings accounts, inherited wealth and even Medicare benefits that fuel its economy.
But others, whom experts see as an important market segment, seek out niches. In that regard, Arizona, with a third of the population of Florida, seems to be making incremental gains on the more established Sunshine State.
�Arizona seems fresher,� says Tom Brady, who fields hundreds of e-mails each month from potential retirees as founder of TopRetirements.com. �If you look at Florida, to some extent it has the same problem the Northeast has � an aging infrastructure that is hard to support.�
While weather plays a role in why people pick a new home, it is more accurate to think of boomers as amenity migrants than climate migrants, says Gene Warren, a Phoenix-based consultant who advises developers and state governments on how to make themselves over to mesh well with the boomers� perceptions of themselves.
The boomers � 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 � �don�t care as much about climate, geography,� Warren says. �They are moving for amenities, which opens up the world to all these smaller communities. Every smaller community is a great place for some reason, and it has these amenities to offer.�
alaska airline miles He notes that both Arizona and Florida are the grandma-grandpa states in the retirement field, and that they could both use a makeover to compete with some of the new states grabbing boomers� attention.
�They are what our parents and grandparents were looking for. They are nice warm places where people can sit around,� Warren says. �The boomers are looking for something different. They are looking for activities, alaska airline miles for lifestyle.�
Instead of bird watching, they want the ability to play golf or softball in the middle of winter, and then to feel comfortable in locking the door through the hot Arizona summer, confident that everything will be in place when they return the following fall.
After checking out a number of places � Palm Desert, Calif., Florida, Hawaii � they ended up making a snowbird move in 2002 that would have been popular decades ago: They bought a manufactured home at Viewpoint. The couple play a lot of golf, attend potluck dinners with new friends and head back to Minnetonka in the spring to gear up for another busy summer of tree-cutting alaska airline miles and plant care.
It is a style of retirement not that much different from the old-timers who live at Sun City, the 50-year-old community of 40,000 on the west side of Phoenix, credited as the first large-scale retirement community.
Just as at Viewpoint, there is a golf cart in virtually every other carport in Sun City. It has eight golf courses, umpteen shuffleboard and tennis courts, two bowling alleys and 130 chartered clubs for those with interests alaska airline miles ranging from canasta to politics.
In one of the more exhaustive studies on baby boomers alaska airline miles and what they want out of life, Age Wave � a think tank and consulting business founded by authors Ken and Maddy Dychtwald � last year said that 52 percent of those surveyed wanted retirement to be �an opportunity for a new exciting chapter in life.�
�I sat in my Midtown apartment, the day after my return, alaska airline miles looking at the snow fall, and I had this epiphany,� Coury says. �I keep working this hard to escape for quiet and nature and horses. Why don�t I just escape?�
alaska airline miles A year later, Coury bought a place of her own in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix, deliberately close to the Arabian Show Horse stables operated by her new mentor, owner-trainer Bill Flood of Queen Creek.
They would be right about the region where the vast majority of the state�s 6.5 million people live, the central valley alaska airline miles in which sits the Phoenix metropolitan area. Phoenix is in the low desert, and it does get ridiculously hot in the daytime each summer, although it cools off quickly at night with no humidity.
They ended up there after a considerable alaska airline miles amount of globe-trotting. In past lives, she was an airline worker, and he was an air traffic controller at Los Angeles� frenetically busy international airport. They met later, in Hawaii, where she helped run a resort and he ran a scuba-diving operation.
A native of Glen Ellyn, Ill., she missed having four seasons, and wanted to stay in touch with friends and family both in Chicago and on the west coast. In Prescott, she feels more connected. �Whenever I want to, I go to Phoenix. I drove to Santa Monica last week to see a girlfriend. alaska airline miles Seven hours,� she said.
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