NEED TO KNOW
- The Love Boat star Jill Whelan and her husband Jeff Knapple moved to Arizona from California earlier this year
- The actress tells PEOPLE she and Knapple are “recruiting everybody” to join them in in the state
- The Princess Cruises Celebrations Ambassador reveals the activity she’s “super excited” about trying with her daughter-in-law
Jill Whelan traveled the world on The Love Boat, but today, she calls Arizona home.
The actress, 51, tells PEOPLE she made the “tough decision” to leave Los Angeles and relocate to Arizona when her son started college there.
“My sister and her husband also decided to move to Arizona, so they stayed with us and they’re just about to move out into their place,” Whelan says. “My son is in school in Tucson, and so that’s pretty magical. We got my mom settled in Arizona, so it’s been a convergence by the Whelans.”
Jill Whelan/Instagram
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Whelan and her husband Jeff Knapple recently wrapped up a renovation on their house and she says, “It is starting to feel like home.”
“It’s been awesome,” the Princess Cruises’ Celebrations Ambassador continues. “We are really happy here. It’s a beautiful place.”
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The former teen star names her new gym as one of the many things she’s fallen in love with in Arizona. “They have a steam room and a sauna, but they also have a cold plunge,” Whelan says.
She admits she said, “Oh, hell no,” after her first cold plunge. “But then I said, ‘You can’t be such a baby. You need to get back in there. You got to be in there for one minute,’” she says. “So I went back in, dunked in and for about two seconds and was like, ‘Nope, not ready yet.’ But I have to say, it was actually really awesome and I do plan on getting to that one-minute goal in the cold plunge at some point.”
The Empty Nesters podcast host says she and her family have been “exploring the restaurants” in Arizona and discovered some wonderful” spots. “And there’s lots of places we have yet to go that we are looking forward to experiencing,” she continues.
Whelan will be traveling the Mediterranean on the Sun Princess this summer (“The Med has always been my favorite,” she says) and then heading to New York City to work with her Love Boat costars Fred Grandy and Ted Lange on an off-Broadway play written by Lange, 77. She welcomes the respite from the Arizona heat.
Alamy Stock Photo
“The summers in Arizona are kind of like the winters on the East Coast,” Whelan says. “You don’t go outside when it’s very miserable out.”
When Whelan returns to Arizona at the end of September, she looks forward to trying another new activity with her daughter-in-law.
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“We are going to be doing this sound bath, which is basically this really cool meditation, but you do it on a paddle board in a pool at sunset,” she says. “So we are super excited about that.”
Whelan says she and her family have truly fallen in love with Arizona — and they want their whole family to move to the Grand Canyon State. “There’s great culture and the community is growing,” she says. “My mom is here, we have two sons that are already there; we’re recruiting everybody else — and we’re recruiting hard.”
