>>Umm, no. Located closeby please, walk to grocery store, don't mind hour drie to work, hot dry weather please, snow storms, 3 feet of snow please but only for a week or two a yeah, and 10 inches of rain please < g >
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>I don't know how easy it is to get a work visa these days. You might have to take whatever opportunity you can get, depending on your skills.
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>If you are in a position to choose, you might like some of the higher elevation small cities in the southwest, such as Santa Fe NM or Flagstaff AZ. They can be pedestrian-friendly and have some high tech jobs available. They will see snow, but are too dry to have snow all the time. They are pleasantly warm in summer. In winter they can be fairly warm by day and frigid at night. Some of those towns are touristy and therefore expensive, like Cornwall I suppose. Santa Fe is rather expensive, Flagstaff probably isn't. Taxes are lower, and so are wages. Santa Fe has beautiful adobe houses. Flagstaff has a sort of classic Route 66 charm, but only downtown. Many towns and cities in the mountain states are ugly, gritty places where you can't walk around much, or there is nothing much to see if you can walk. I'm thinking of Albuquerque and El Paso.
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>Europeans might be happier in some of the older (often expensive) cities which look more European and have street life. I once worked for a company founded by an Englishman, in Charleston SC. He was said to have moved the company there from Long Island after seeing it and being reminded of England. The lower wages and taxes must have been another reason. Charleston is my favorite southern city. The buildings are old and beautiful, but the palmettos, live oaks, and spanish moss make it look very unlike England. It used to be very cheap outside of downtown, but is now being discovered.
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>But if you really want to change your life, maybe you want a place that looks and feels completely different from Europe. In that case, you can't beat Texas, where the summers are hellish, the strip development is endless, the tex-mex food is omnipresent, and the countryside is a planar void.
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>Last week's issue of The Economist says that house prices nationwide have not increased as fast in the USA as they have in the UK. But some of our cities are as bad as London in that way. That article says that rents in both countries are rising much slower than purchase prices, indicating a speculative bubble.
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>Most of eastern North America gets over 40 inches /100 cm rain per year, more than most of Britain. But it isn't so relentlessly drizzly. Upstate New York can be dreary in that way, but with more bracing winters. If you are curious about the weather common to a place, you can put its name in www.weather.com and click the link that says "averages and records".
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>Our immigration service is worse than ever after 9/11/2001. Getting through that without some bureaucratic nightmare is largely luck, I think. It helps that you don't have a muslim name or come from a muslim country, but you are not immune. I sold a car to a guy who was giving it to his English wife, a teacher. She told me of her four year battle to straighten out her work visa. I don't know the details. If Dragan weighs in, he can tell you some stories.
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>More jobs in an area means higher wages, and higher rents and home prices. But if you are in a popular resort or retirement area, you may have high rents and low wages. Western Massachusetts has that problem.
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>You didn't say how much crime risk you can tolerate. I have heard that many Europeans worry about that here. Murder rates in America, in most big cities and nationwide, are less than half of what they were a decade ago. But they are still far higher than almost any place in Europe, as you have probably heard. Most of these murders happen in places you will never need to visit. I have lived and worked around Washington, the former "murder capital", most of my life. I have never heard gunfire or been threatened by anything. I read somewhere that the UK now has a higher nationwide rate of armed robbery than the USA. For things like pickpocketing and auto break-ins, there might be few places in America that are as bad as much of the Mediterranean.
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>When I am ready to buy a house, however, I will probably stay outside the city limits. I don't worry about my person, but I do worry about my home and my parked car. I am also concerned with the quality of local government.
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>While we are on the subject, I should say that I recommend Washington as a place to live, despite the congestion, crime downtown, 100 degree/80% humidity/100 air quality index days in summer, and high rents. The jobs are numerous here, but they tend to require citizenship.
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>I should probably get back to work now. I'd be keen to hear about what you do next.

Thanks very much for the details, much appreciated.

It's such a big place it's difficult to know where to relocate, just browsing on job sites seems to indicate there is 10 times more work than here in UK, which is good. We are looking at East Coast, (Miami?) but still not quite sure, it is quite daunting given the size, one of the things we want to do is up our quality of life, so it will be getting a job foremost and then deciding where we can live after that.

It's difficult at the moment to know who to speak to, all we have is the internet but I wish I could talk face to face to someone about it, there's a lot to do and one thing I won't do is rush into it, take it step by step.

Kev