Relocation

 I’ve been thinking about relocating. For several years now it has been my plan to move to Virginia someday. Today I decided to investigate how to define that plan in more detail. First, I thought about my criteria. I want to be at a reasonable distance from my parents—ninety minutes is sort of my ideal, but I think I could handle up to four hours. I would want to live in a city, or rather on the outskirts of a city, at least as large as Burlington but preferably larger. This would help employment opportunities, meeting people, and general accessibility to goods and services. Ideally, I would have decent access to a larger city as well—within two hours. I wouldn’t want to live in a huge city though, especially not one known for its traffic like Richmond or DC. Neither would I want to live at or near the coast. The housing prices should be reasonable, hopefully similar to what is around here if not cheaper. I would need to find a good local church, but that’s a more advanced step. It might help me narrow down options, though.

With these criteria in mind, I examined Virginia and found it lacking. My recent thoughts have been of Roanoke and Danville, but it turns out that the latter is smaller than Burlington which probably eliminates it. Roanoke is smaller than I expected at 100k and a metropolitan area of 300k—about the size of Greensboro. It’s about 2 hours away from Burlington, which is a bit further than ideal. Also less than ideal is that the nearest large city is Richmond, over 2 hours away. Charlottesville seems like my other option. It’s over three hours from home, but has easy access to Richmond and DC, and makes New England a much more driveable vacation possibility. I enjoyed visiting Charlottesville, and I think I would enjoy living there.

While I have two decent options, I realized that North Carolina is actually much more ideal. If I move half an hour to the east or so, I could potentially work anywhere in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area. If I move 30-45 minutes to the west, I could work in the Greensboro-High Point-Winston Salem area. Both of these areas have populations of over a million, which easily surpasses my Virginia options. Even Charlotte might have more potential than them.

While an actual employment would weight any decisions heavily, at the moment that’s not really a factor. Actually, I take that back, since I could conceivably move either direction in NC while staying employed at my current company. The problem with that is my lease. Money would also become an issue quickly if my salary doesn’t increase sufficiently. Also, if I’m going to do student teaching in the near future, I would prefer to do it at BCA. Even so, I think I will look into it just to get a feel for the possibilities and perhaps set up a tentative goal.