@ether: thanks, I'll have to add Anna Karenina near the top of my list of books to read
@thrifty++: I push for NZ (and also AUS) sometimes, but my partner won't budge on settling so far from her family
@Ego: taking things for granted seems to be almost the human condition. On the trail you stop taking for granted flush toilets and protection from the rain and lots of other things. For example, you might celebrate a location with cell phone reception or the opportunity to share a small shelter with just one other person.
Anyway, it's not that we're unwilling to compromise or difficult to make happy. We would be happy just about anywhere. We're just cursed with this need to choose the optimal rather than the good enough.
@nestbuilder: the big city thing is more for my partner than for me. I don't mind the city and she has a real preference for them. That said, I do like walkable places, and medium-sized walkable places are pretty hard to find in the US (other than college towns).
@FrenchGirl: thanks, another EU walk to consider is El Camino Santiago. If you want to do a US thru-hike make sure you get at least a six month visa and get started right away to give yourself some breathing room. There were a number of AT thru-hikers on the trail having to make tough decisions because of visa issues.
@jacob: well, we can't figure out everything in a day, but we can figure out some things like "although the median house price in this city as a whole is $180k, the median house price in the neighborhoods where we would actually want to live is $600k, so this city is nowhere near as cheap as it looked"
One unexpected benefit of seeing a bunch of cities in succession is we started noticing patterns across them, such as certain types of neighborhoods seem to pop up in each city, and fortunately we seem to agree on neighborhood preference.
I think our actual plan is something like 1) a three month sublet, followed by 2) a 12-month lease (or month-to-month or another sublet) if we still like it, followed by 3) buying if we still like it. We just need to pick the initial sublet in a city where we might still want to be after the sublet is up.
@jennypenny: we can't plan around homeschooling yet because my partner, the more natural educator of the two of us, isn't sure she wants to do it.
@theanimal: yeah, I'm really struggling to recapture the simplicity. I think I won't even have a chance until we settle somewhere. After that, I have a major disadvantage which is that I want to use a computer/the internet for creative work and to take advantage of my strengths, but having access to a computer and the internet also opens the door to my greatest weakness: wasting time on the internet.
@m741: hmm, I hesitate to trash a bunch of random cities just because they're not quite right for my situation, so I'll just stick to the winner of the road trip: Charlottesville, Virginia. Population: ~$50k. A walkable college town home to UVa, one of the best public universities. 3BR houses in good neighborhoods for around $200k. Six hour drive to New York. Gigabyte internet available from ting. Near mountains and some of the best hiking on the AT. Residents can check books out from both the town library AND all the university libraries. About as good as weather gets on the east coast in my opinion: south enough for mild winters, but north enough for all four seasons and reasonable summers. Culturewise it also seemed southern enough to pick up some things like friendliness, but still has enough northern influence for us to feel comfortable. Lots of smart people around and things to walk to thanks to the university. Small enough that you could walk clear across it, but big enough to have a Costco and things to do.
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So at the end of our road trip these cities still remain:
places we like but would need to spend a few months in to understand better: Charlottesville, Austin, Denver/Boulder, Portland OR, Seattle, San Francisco, Chapel Hill NC, Philly
places we like and already understand: Boston, Chicago (could jump straight to buying if we chose one of these)
places we know nothing about but want to visit at some point: Longmont CO, Salt Lake City, Baltimore, Charleston (skipped due to flooding)
We started looking for ~1-4 month sublets in Charlottesville after our road trip was over, but were really disappointed with what was available on craigslist. In Chicago without much trouble I was able to chain together ~1-4 month sublets and try out a bunch of different neighborhoods, but in C'ville there's barely any good sublet listings at all. We found ourselves already feeling the pain of a smaller city. This trouble combined with my partner's doubts about whether C'ville was big enough for her to begin with caused us to start looking at craigslist in Austin, where we found much better options.
And so we're moving to Austin, for a few months at least. Unless plans change, we leave Wednesday, and we'll split the 26 hour drive across three days.
Things I like about Austin: college town, warm weather, Google Fiber internet, mexican/BBQ food, should be walkable/bikeable (but we'll see), techie influence, quirky/weird culture leading to things like
this, houses under $250k. Weather wise Austin also comboes well with spending summers in New England and especially Maine.
Our biggest fears for Austin include being too far from family (4 hour flight, not driveable) and it being too hot (and yes I understand that global warming will likely exacerbate this).
Let me know if you live in Austin and want to meet up! We'll need to build a new social circle from scratch.