Finding My Spot

In my continual quest to keep myself entertained via the World Wide Web, I came upon a mildly interesting site called Find Your Spot, which asks you a bunch of questions about your preferences and then tells you which places in the US it thinks you'd be most likely to want to live in. (It insists on asking you for your name and address before it'll tell you, which is annoying, but, hey, if you're feeling paranoid about it, you can always lie.)

Not that I'm planning on relocating soon. Or at all, really. I was just idly curious. For the record, my number one choice appears to be Seattle, Washington. I'm not really sure about that. From what I've heard, Seattle is in many ways a nice city. But I've been through there once, and while I know that the view from the highway really isn't a fair basis upon which to judge any city, my impression of the place mainly involved lots and lots of hideous, horrible, unbelievably bad traffic. Now, I know this makes me completely impossible to satisfy, but the thing is, while I actually quite like cities, I hate traffic. Plus Seattle apparently gets about 15" of snow a year, and I don't much like snow, either.

Choice #2 was Bellingham, WA, way up on the Washington coast, near the Candian border. Sounds like a nice town from their description, and they get a lot less snow than Seattle, so, hey, maybe I'll keep it in mind if I ever get a desperate desire to move to Washington. As for the other recommendations... I dunno, not all of them sound all that attractive. I mean, Cincinatti? Tulsa? Boring!

It's not too surprising that both of the top choices were in Washington, I suppose, since when it asked me if I had a preference for a particular area of the country, I clicked on the Pacific Northwest. Based on my visit there last year, it seemed like a really nice place. Actually, if we're talking about places I'd genuinely like to live, I must say that I fell absolutely in love with Vancouver, just on my very short acquaintance with it. (Um, yes, that's Vancouver, British Columbia, not Vancouver, WA.) Very attractive, very pleasant city. And, as cities go, the traffic didn't seem all that bad, either (though apparently it requires copius amounts of red tape to get a permit if you actually want to park). Come to that, I don't think they get very much snow, either. If I ever do get throroughly sick and tired of living in Socorro, it may well be the first place on my list, foreign country or no.

Interestingly, none of the places that came up are in the area of the country where I do currently live. This isn't actually very surprising, as I quickly realized as I was taking the quiz that that was going to be the case. Do I like long, hot summers? Hmm, you know, I don't really think I do. Do I find being cold in the winter more acceptable than being hot in the summer? As long as there's not much of that damned snow, uh... yeah. You can bundle up in the cold, but there ain't a whole lot you can do about the heat. (As is being amply demonstrated here this summer, unfortunately.)

Not that New Mexico doesn't have its compensations, notably in the aforementioned lack-of-snow and lack-of-traffic departments. Throw in the good Mexican food, the fact that you almost never have to worry about being rained on (even though I quite like rain), and the fact that there are lots of great places to hike and camp and get away from people, and it shapes up as an acceptable place to live. Anyway, much as I miss the cheesesteaks and the convenience of being no more than a 15-minute drive from pretty much any store, restaurant, or entertainment facility you'd care to name, it still beats the horrible suburban sprawl of my native New Jersey...