Texas!!!!!!! It's like a whole 'nother country. Tropical south, wintery north and everything in between. DFW to LON non-stop...

But what about the mossies?

Well I can highly recommend Mass, Boston specifically except, and its a big except, for the housing prices!

The winters are pretty harsh but the rest of the year compensates. I know if we move further south the winters will be milder but the summers will be unbearable but at least we could afford to get a decent sized house.......... we are looking at New Jersey just to take 10 degrees off the winter! I heard PA is buggy - can anyone from there confirm/deny?

We also toy with Maine but the winters in Boston are bad enough so we may settle on New Hampshire to get the best of both worlds between MA and ME and bonus - favourable taxes and cheap/big houses!

My stipulation is we have to be near a major airport within 2 hours on the east coast. Have done New York, Houston and San Francisco to get a cross section and fortunately we have both realised there is a small section of the east coast that is really 'us' but it's still hard pinning down the perfect spot!

So good luck finding your state! It's harder than you think!

Errr....NH....very high property taxes...but on the plus, tax free booze
And maine, if you plonk yourself in the southern half of the state, slighlty more pricey there, but it's a lot warmer than the northern half, and Portlands a great city, and the airport isn't bad, with regular flights to Boston....or Bangor has or at least did, have direct flights to the UK, weren't cheap though.

I've been here since the back end of May - I arrived just in the cold, wet spell, having signed off a ship sailing in the Gulf of Mexico! It was certainly a shock to the system. I've gathered that the snow restrictions on parking do make life somewhat interesting, I shall look forward to trying to find my way home after parking the car in some random carpark somewhere.

The pollution doesn't seem to be that bad; not nearly as bad as where I worked back in Dorset. Maybe the smell of fish just masks the smell of exhaust fumes!

Maine! Come to Maine! We have Lobstah!

It's the paper mills...when it storms, there probably the most smelliest thing next to chicken poop
But Portland has done loads to tidy up in the last few years, which is great, the old port now is really nice and safe, was nasty a few years ago...bit like Augusta is now I guess, a dump *l*

Bit like the England football team?

- What about the summer when it looks beautiful outside but the streets are deserted because its so humid everyone is stuck inside with the a/c on? Its not like that ALL the time, but quite often lately it seems (this is my first summer here)

Maybe Im picking on the humidity because I just got back from a weeks vacation in California, yeah like I could afford to buy a house there....

Apart from the cold winters and humid summers I love Mass!! but like I said its just too much of a tease sometimes!

Massachusetts is close to the UK, 5 or 6 hour direct flight from Boston, liberal, has same sex marriage and Democratic senators. However, you won't go wrong if you pick any of the "Blue States", those that voted for Kerry in the 2004 election, see below

Dear Red States:

We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.

In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and the entire Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma, and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand. We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama.

We get two-thirds of the tax revenue; you get to make the red states pay their fair share.

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose, and they don't care if you don't show pictures of their children's caskets coming home. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to spend our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of 80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90 percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines (you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias, and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs),92 percent of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson, and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53 percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and 61 percent of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals then we lefties.

Sincerely,
Author Unknown in New California.

PMSL that's awesome....i'm moving to New California

you need to open a new thread with this

http://zapatopi.net/cascadia/

Can you explain "island fever", is that the feeling of wanting to get off?

I'm not the O/P but that is exactly what it means. We lived in Singapore for a few years - it's the roughly the same shape and size of the Isle of Wight (Singapore is approx 12 miles north to south and 26 miles east to west) but with over 3 million people living on it and no countryside, save for some parks and small nature reserves.

We certainly felt as if we were getting 'island fever' from time to time - the feeling of claustrophobia or being almost trapped in a confined space - so every few weeks we would drive across the causeway (it took hours sometimes) to Malaysia or you could take a high-speed ferry to the neighbouring Indonesian islands (once went to Batam, Indonesia with friends for lunch LOL!).

Unlike Hawaii which is quite isolated in the Pacific, we were able to take short flights to places like Phuket and Bangkok in Thailand, fly up to Hong Kong, the Philippines or take holidays in Australia and New Zealand etc. My one regret is that we never made it to Vietnam.....we ran out of time....

What really made me laugh here was when I first saw the Hawaiian flag and noticed it has a Union Jack in the corner - when i asked someone why I was told that King Kamehameha saw it on the English ships, back in Captain Cook's time, and though it looked regal and sophisticated so he decided he would just put it on his flag too and it has been there ever since!![/QUOTE]


Nah - it was actually under British rule for a few weeks (well some short period of time)

Here I go again but it sounds like Portland, Oregon might fit your bill. Summers are warm but not too hot, winters are cool but rarely cold, the politics are very liberal, it's still reasonably affordable, and there are plenty of day trip options from the city. Flights to the UK from PDX are quite expensive but bargains can sometimes be had. I could write pages on the best aspects of Oregon, and I can't honestly think of anything offhand that I don't really like aside from the usual expat gripes of living in the USA (lack of vacation, hidden costs, etc., etc.).

I have lived in California, the North East, the South East, and recently the last several months in North Carolina where my wife and I moved to for the sole reason of being closer to familly. Compared to here we found North Carolina conservative and dull, and moved back to Portland in June. I found that saving a couple of hundred bucks on the price of an occasional air ticket and being able to spend Thanksgiving with the in-laws wasn't worth it. Probably would not choose to live outside the PNW again unless it's to move to a different country.

Good luck on finding your future home. If you can afford the time and money it may make sense to pick ten potential places and go visit them first. This will at least give you a feel for them. Don't do what we did and spend $20K to move across country twice and live without an income for nearly a year in a place that is not to your tastes.