Hi Carla and Redsox! Gosh, I haven't been back here in a bit. Just lurking today and saw your posts. I will be spending a week or so checking out a good portion of the South in early March. Eldest daughter lives in Florida, so my 2 other daughters & I will be going for a quick visit, and spending the rest of the time doing a very preliminary look-see in a couple of states. We took our internal and informal vote. That's three whole votes. The results, in order of preference for wanting to see: 1. NC and TN tied. 2. SC and GA tied. 3. If we had more time, we'd love to go through Mississippi, Alabama, etc. all the way to Texas, but we are not blessed with that many days off. :-) Of course, one week isn't enough time to do justice to any place, but it's a start, to kind of get a feel for things. Since we'll be driving mostly down the East Coast, we'll only see the tourist-y places in most states, so we have to narrow down the scope of places where we want to spend a day or two, and the easiest places to do that AND be able to spend a couple of days with oldest daughter. In the interests of time, I think we'll have to scope out the east coastal states. Everyone has decided that NC is a place we really want to look at, and we will spend a couple of days there. Folks from NC -- feel free to recommend favorite spots that would help get to look at local (not tourist) culture. If we have time, we'll swing over to parts of TN, but may have to save that for a late summer/early fall trip. I could get more time off, buy my daughters have been in their jobs for less than three years, so they don't get a lot of vacation time. We'll just have to plan another trip later in the year. Go ahead, twist my arm! I'd also enjoy checking out KY and WV, but they will have to be relegated to the next trip. I guess a Bosox fan in KY would feel a bit displaced. :-) But the Northeast "culture" has been oppressively brutal, although I will always love the "Yankee"/New England geography and flora and fauna. The small towns, especially. Truly lovely.

Lots of good information has been posted already, much of which I totally agree with. Winter is definitely the best time to do the heavy clearing because, as noted, no bugs, and the layers of clothing that are needed don't cause a problem. After trying many different garments I've decided that the Filson tin cloth stuff works best. The multi-flora rose is really tough on everthing else. I wear a pair of the double tin cloth chaps, and the logging jacket. I usually burn the stuff as I'm cutting. I've found that the rose and honeysuckle don't stack well, leaving large piles that just become breeding grounds for new plants that sprout from the seeds. Burning also makes it possible to work in some really nasty weather as you have a source of heat. I use a lot of hand tools, with a good pair of loppers and a hand saw (Fanno makes a wonderful saw for this) being the most useful. Hedge shears come in handy to cut a way into the base of the plant. If you are burning, once the plant has been cut at the base you can often just drag it to the fire. Spring, summer and fall I spend on maintenance of the areas cleared during the winter. In the spring I can usually cut back the new growth with a grass whip on a heavy duty brush cutter. As the growth gets older and tougher I change to the plastic blades and eventually the brush blade. Or a scythe (see scythesupply.com). That tool has been very useful, and very relaxing. I have been using sort of an all-purpose blade, but am thinking of getting a blade just for brush. For larger areas I use a DR mower. There are many things about the mower that I don't like, but it does what the DR folks says it will do, and more. As for the native plants, I do try to save them, but I've found that most will come back if given a chance. So my initial approach is to cut everything but the trees, then when I'm doing maintenance I can be more selective about what I'm going to trim back. A large supply of survey flags will come in handy. Whenever I see something that I want to look at again (like when it is leafing out in spring), or that I really want to save, I stick in a flag. I do this because after clearing the brush I usually scatter some grass seed. The ground is usually almost bare under the rose, honeysuckle and autumn olive. It's amazing how fast the grass will come up and hide all those interesting plants that I might want to save. Each spring I buy 50-100 lbs of seed from Ernst Seeds in western PA. They have an assortment of reclamation mixes that are not too expensive

Thanks for the link. It just confirms our decision to leave New Jersey as soon as my DH retires. I just paid my quarterly real estate tax today and looked back at previous bills. My 2009 property tax is just about double what I paid only 10 years ago. Yep- we have the highest property taxes in the nation. Can't wait to move back to PA- not a bargain, but significantly better than NJ. Or maybe we'll look into our other neighbor- Delaware.

I can’t imagine moving elsewhere — we have too many friends and connections in our current town and I don’t want to start over socially. We just moved to our “empty nest” home in the same town we’ve lived in for 22 years. (Still have one out of three kids home, but she will go to college next fall.) Even though we‘re in the same town, our location is a bit more urban feeling, which is what we wanted. We are very close to the post office, library, shops, etc. I love it, even though it’s been a little crazy as our house has been under construction (mostly exterior) for about 6 weeks now. There are a lot of couples nearby who are similar in age — some we already knew, some we’ve met since we moved. The house is really too big for just two of us, but will be perfect for when our kids and eventual grandkids visit. And will prevent DH and I from killing each other in retirement. (We need our own space.) Once we are in full retirement mode, I can see us spending summers at our beach house, a month or so someplace warm in the winter, and most of the rest of the year at our “main” house. DH is planning to retire next summer (at age 57) but I can‘t see our full retirement mode kicking in until our youngest has graduated from college.