Best I can say is if medical care is an important need for you, then you will need to look at the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. Rural areas lack much of the health care you might need. As a retired medic that worked in rural areas, I'm not lying when I say if I were to have a heart attack at home, I'm probably very dead before help can arrive.

Makes sense, I believe you.

My idea is to make the move after I am more mobile, more healed.

At the moment, I am doing PT at home, after getting some inital PT sessions and them giving me printed out worksheets.

No real point in paying for more visits when I just do exactly the same thing at the PT center, as what I do at home.

While Minnesota shows as a mostly blue state, that is because we have one large metropolitan area that dominates the rest of the state. And outside of that metro region, the rural 80% of the state skews from purple to red.

Yep, I've seen the county level voting maps, who runs city governments of Minneapolis, St Paul, Rochester, Winona, Duluth, St Cloud, Brainerd, Bemidji... and I'm originally from the Seattle area, pretty much exact same region political pattern.

Otherwise, plan on long cold winters that can grind some people mentally and what to us is warm and very humid summers. We are an outdoors people that enjoy the 3 months of summer and spend as much of our time outdoors as possible. Preferably on a lake in a boat, we own a LOT of boats. Even in winter we find snowmobiling, skiing, and ice fishing as popular hobbies. We are all about the outdoors for sure.

All sounds amazing to me, again, grew up in the PNW, lots and lotsa outdoorsy culture as well, particularly boating, hiking, hunting.

Though, our winters are nowhere near as harsh generally, but I know what a lot of actual snow is like, the Cascade foothills and towns often get around as much snow as what ya'll just get generally, and I've spent a few winters in 3 to 6 feet of snow up there, know how to dress and drive in snow.

As far as the denizens of the state go, we are Minnesota Nicetm to everyone, but as individuals we are mostly stoic and often wary of outsiders. And the farther you get from the cites, the more that becomes apparent. So it can be difficult to build friendships. You can live in a town for 20 years years and still be considered the "new people". Or you can be accepted and welcomed immediately. YMMV for sure.

And we have the 'Seattle Freeze' or 'Seattle Chill' over in western WA, basically the same thing.

Whole lotta Fins and Swedes and Norweigans seem to be the reason for that, were the first large groups of white people that settled in both MN and western WA, set the sort of cultural norms that largely still persist....

... and I already am that same way too, hahah.

.........

Not to be too blunt, but geographically, Minnesota basically seems like western WA, but flat, with harsher winters, and a lack of salt water giving that lovely smell... that also corrodes everything metal more quickly.

Plus tornadoes.

Less volcanoes though, less earthquakes.

Roughly same amount of forest fire and smoke either in the area or coming down from Canada.

.........

If you decide to move here, I wish you luck. As a whole, we are a good and helpful place to live. But there can be bumps on the road of life here also.

I appreciate it, and your rundown here.

Lets just say in terms of moving, all I'd really have to do is ... find an apartment to move into, pack all my shit into a rental uhaul, and drive something like 3-6 hours east on I 90 / north on other highways.

I just have to get to the point where I can physically manage the packing all my shit into a uhaul part.

Well, and/or figure out just some kind of rental situation that'll actually allow me to do a cross state lines, fairly long haul move, that doesn't wipe me out financially.