My wife and I were living in Escondido, California near San Diego, California and neither of us were having much luck finding jobs in our fields. And while Southern California is a wonderful place to live, it's not the cheapeast place on the planet to get by in. Plus, after having moved from St. Louis to the West Coast, we realized that if we needed to get "home" quickly, that it would require an expensive plane trip.
So, we thought about where we wanted to live. We knew that we wanted;
1) To be within a day's drive of St. Louis, Missouri (where are familes are based).
2) To be far enough north to where we would experience all four seasons.
3) To be far enough south to where the winters weren't too bad.
and (4) After having lived in Southern California with it's close proxemity to both the mountains and the ocean, we wanted to recreate this access as closely as possible.
Those criteria meant that we could start looking along the gulf coast, then north along the Atlantic coast as far north as the Washington, DC area.
DC and the surrounding area seemed a bit pricey and to be honest, South Carolina seemed a bit too conservative for us, so that left Richmond, VA and the triangle as our most obvious choices.
Richmond is a neat city, but Raleigh/Durham offered the best job opportunities, so that is where we concentrated our search.
When my wife got some nibbles from employers here in the triangle, we packed up the truck and moved away from Beverly...Hills that it...swimming pools and movie stars....(actually, when we were in LA, we lived in Redondo Beach).
What we've found since moving here in 2012 is that the weather here is great! With the exception of allergy season (April and May??), the weather here is marvelous. It's exactly as we expected it to be with having four distinct seasons (not counting allergy season), and the winters not being bad at all.
The ocean isn't as close as it was in Escondido (from our home in Cary, the ocean is about a 2 - 3 hour drive). Nor are the mountains quite as close with the places that we've visited being at least a 3.5 hour drive from our home.
The cost of living here is MUCH better than Southern California with the cost of housing being a ton cheaper!
People are friendly, though there does seem to be some hostility against transplants by the locals with folks moving here from the Northeast bearing the brunt of the attitude. That said, in three years I've only had one local actually say anything to me about not being from here. It might help that my wife has a southern accent?
Bob
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