I'm so, so sorry to hear about your daughter. How sad.

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Utrecht is extremely nice, but not so cheap.

I mean, everything's quite a bit cheaper than New York City, at least pre-COVID.

Utrecht's city center is a bit modernized but has one of the very best music spaces I've ever been in, with I think six different spaces.

If you are in the Randstad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randstad then you're about an hour away from anywhere.

Amsterdam is very pretty, followed closely by Utrecht, and the prices reflect. Rotterdam and Den Haag are more affordable and less pretty.

Even the ugliest Dutch city is stunningly beautiful compared to, say, Brooklyn. Also, a decent apartment here has a dishwasher, clothes washer and probably a dryer, which I just never had in NYC.

The downside is that it's all expensive to some degree.

We're looking at Enschede about four hours from here. It's a college town in a smaller conglomerate of four or five cities over 100k, much cheaper, seemingly livable.