In North Carolina, a hard-right shift hits a roadblock

[Alcibiades]

50. I have a lot of friends up there

Did my undergraduate at Washington College, and so a lot of people I went to school with are in the DC area. When I have visited, my mind boggled at what the costs--financial and otherwise-are of living in the bits of VA and MD close to DC are. One of my best friends, looking for a house with good public schools, settled in Pasadena, and got a house that is a bit smaller and older than mine for $150 k more. And he gets to spend nearly two and a half hours a day in the car. Some other folks I know did much better simply by buying houses as soon as they could in the mid 1990's in areas that happened to undergo massive house price inflation in subsequent years. But still, all the driving in DC traffic. Horrid.

We do have some nice things here. You can go to some wonderful beaches in the summer and the mountains in the fall. Durham and Chapel Hill are reasonably progressive for NC, but Chapel Hill has real estate prices that rival the DC market area. Culturally, the Piedmont is not terribly different from the tidewater bits of MD and VA, and we even have crab. Summers are about the same as in DC: miserably hot. We just get less snow, though it still happens on average twice a year, though it rarely sticks.