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.

State politics is a BIG issue as far as retirement goes. Weather or not you may have Medicare, medicaid, or ANY kind of breaks or help etc. largely depends on whether or not your state government is progressive democrat or reich wing nutters out to destroy anything that could remotely help retirees and those on lower income. I did live in California most of my life, however had to come to NC to help my mother for the past 18 years. She recently passed away age 95 so we are leaving this reich wing hell hole asap. I lived in Oregon for 6 months and loved it. Most areas in California that I would like to live is FAR to expensive for us. Our old house in Newport Beach that my family bought in 1975 for $25,000 last sold for $1.7 MILLION. We could not possibly find anything there even remotely in our price range, even for rent. We just went on a 27 day cross country trip, camping along the way. Went back to my old stomping grounds and saw our old house. Would move back to Southern California in a heartbeat if we won the lottery. However we have to exist on our retirement which is only about $4,200 a month, plus fortunately cost of living raises per year. So we spent 5 days in Bend Oregon on this trip to get a feel of it, for my wife to see it and to look at homes we can afford. She absolutely fell in love with Bend and why wouldn't she bend is like Shangri-La compared to Raleigh NC. We found several homes just south of Bend ON the Deschutes River with a dock, about a 1/2 acre of land usually, 2+ car garage, plus large workshop plus HUGE RV parking garage the size of a blimp hanger and all for under $200,000. I just now was actually looking on Zillow at a couple places in Florence Oregon right on the coast for the same price range and right on the water. Oregon is literally like being on a different planet compared to NC. Nice weather,(if you are east of the Cascades) very few bugs, low humidity, gorgeous country side, blue as blue can be politically so you know the state legislature isn't sitting there doing nothing but trying to come up with ways to screw you 24/7 like virtually every single red state is. Unless you are very well off with LOTS of money in the bank and a big retirement of at least $100K+ per year then you are a damn fool to live in a red state and or vote for Tpublicans. Sadly politics rules virtually everything we do, especially if you are lower income making less than $150K a year. That is just a fact we must live with and a fact you had better acknowledge and accept when looking for a place to retire. There are no Republicans left only Tpublicans and 100% of them are stark raving insane and have no more care for the bottom 98% than they do an ant on the sidewalk. I only hope my wife and I can sell our house asap before this positively insane batch of nuts that are now in 100% totalitarian control of the NC legislature drag down the state even further.

Anyone who is at all concerned with environmental quality (superfund sites, brownfields, etc) would not want northern Delaware. Dupont esssentially used the state as a dumping ground. Southern Delaware is less polluted but also has an alarming lack of good medical facilities (hospitals etc) which is often very important to people of retirement age. Southern Delaware (often called Lower Slower Delaware) is also the chicken-farm capital of the USA. If you are turnd off by the presence of mobile home parks you might not care for that in the region either. Also, someone from the tri-state may find the much slower way of life frustrating when it comes to repair people etc (this told to me by a former NYer who moved down there and ended up coming back). I currently live in the tri-state myself and know exactly what the OP is talking about, cost-of-living wise... but one has to look at the whole picture. In NJ and downstate NY we pay a lot in taxes but we also get many services that people in other parts of the country can only dream about. There's no such thing as a free (tax) lunch, anywhere. Lots and lots of research is needed before making a retirement decision. As someone reminded me recently, if you are only looking at the dollars and cents you may be very unhappy after you move. This post was edited by Helena2013 on Fri, Nov 21, 14 at 15:13

Thanks to all of you who commiserated with me. Yes indeed it is good news. We've been absolutely sick about the whole thing. Susan, I hope this isn't anywhere near you. I'm sure you would have heard something if it was. Plan B will run north from Berwick past Wilkes Barre and Scranton, then east near Hawley and then southeast to Bushkill where it will cross the Delaware River into New Jersey.