Relocating to Indiana

we live in indiana, and love it here!

bloomington indiana is a great city with lots of smart, well educated, diverse people because of the university, but no big city problems like traffic, crime, etc. we have good schools, it's about an hour away from indianapolis, and there are great city parks and kids programs. you could have a horse if you live just out of the city... tons of farms around here. i've heard people complain there is nothing to do around here... but with thousands of free concerts at the music school (ranked higher than julliard this year!!!), farmers market, great theater, a free art museum, a fantastic kids science museum, sports, and lots of parks programs and stuff we have never found it boring to live here. it's a great place to raise a family!

feel free to ask me more questions. i have been here for 12 years, and my husband is a native hoosier.

i also happen to have a friend in tucson who moved from bloomington; she misses it and really loved living here... maybe you could hook up with her! :)

We lived in West Lafayette for a while. It's about an hour Northwest of Indianapolis. WL is a college town which gave the town a good vibe. WL has excellent schools, house prices are affordable. The area of Lafayette/West Lafayette has about 80,000 people.

Just wanted to mention in case you haven't heard.....
Kalamazoo Public Schools (in Kalamazoo MI) offers the "Kalamazoo Promise" which is a privately funded program that provides FREE college tuition to any 4 yr college/university in the state of Michigan for all graduates! Pretty good program!
School scores have been down, but since the annoucement of the promise, scores and enrollment are on the rise. They have also built a new middle school and elementary school. Kalamazoo is a great city (on the smaller size for a city) with a great little downtown life, theatres, breweries, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo Valley Community College, 2 of Michigans BEST hospitals - Borgess and Bronson. And only about 1 hr from Lake Michigan, 30 min drive to Ft Custer State park, 2hrs to Chicago, 2 hrs to Detroit, and 1 hr to GrandRapids. You couldn't have a horse in city limits though :), but you could board one in all of the surrounding country/smaller towns.

Let me know if you have any questions!

I'm going to second Bloomington! I lived in Lafayette for 21 years and although I love it Bloomington is better in my book. The schools in Lafayette are not that great (I went from preK to high school there) the schools in Bloomington are great from what I've heard. Not to mention Bloomington is beautiful and IU was rated one of the most beautiful campuses. Both Lafayette and Bloomington are about an hour outside of Indianapolis. Bloomington is a bit more liberal and Lafayette a bit more conservative but it just depends what you're looking for.

I would recommend looking into Bloomington, Lafayette, Fort Wayne, Fischers and Carmel (both outside of Indy)

Places to avoid Monticello, Muncie, Kokomo, Gary (sorry to offend anyone if they live there just my opinion).

My hubby and I are from LaPorte!! Nice, small area but nothing going on there in way of jobs at all!! He is prior active duty and we were stationed in SC and moved to FL for him to work because of the lack of jobs in our home town/area. His dad has been laid off 2 times now from the same place in 3 yrs!!! So I recommend checking how the job market is for the areas you are thinking of living. And don't forget the closer north you go, the more snow you get :)

Good luck!
S.

You can get on the Indiana Dept. of Education website and look up potential school systems. It has data including IStep testing (our State standardized test) scores, % of free/reduced lunch, student/teacher ratios, and other useful information in deciding on a potential school system for your kids.