To my taste, the most attractive candidates are New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York. All three offer enormous amounts of gorgeous wooded green places, but aren't ridiculously far away from major urban centers.

What else comes to mind? Canada, maybe, but that'd be literally a foreign country, which could get sticky. Maine is too remote. Most places in the South would be overly hot, and I don't want to be far away from my family, and the East Coast that I love, in the West -- although a second place somewhere in the Midwest or the West Coast would be peachy, but that's getting absurdly ahead of myself.

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2001

Answers

I'm in agreement. The New England area seems to make the most sense, because of being the only area in the US, really, with the increasingly unlikely pairing of open and more-or-less wilderness land as well as a fair number of cities close by. With the possible exception of the Big Sur area of CA, or of OR or WA, there isn't much land out west - and though those areas would be nice, there are fewer cities, for one thing, and for another, I too would rather have the place more East Coast than not. The few areas of the South worth considering - the mountains of VA, or northern North Carolina - have the same disadvantages, and the land would likely be a little harder to come by (and, from the people I know who have been looking to get tracts of land in the area, it's more expensive than the prices we've seen for northern land, too). The Midwest is a possibility, I suppose, but I'm just not as drawn to it. Although, if we stumbled upon a sweet deal, I'd certainly consider it. But I'd prefer to focus on an area somewhere within the triangulation of, say, Buffalo, Boston, and Burlington. Land in MA would likely be more scarce and more expensive, though, and northern NH is certainly worth considering further, too. ME probably is a little too removed, and so is most of Canada. I have no idea about prices or regulations / zoning concerning land in Canada, either. Within the above-mentioned triangulation, though, we'd have ready access, for sake of culture, performance, etc., to Burlington, Manchester, Boston, Amherst, Albany, Buffalo, NYC, Hartford, New Haven, Providence, even Philadelphia.

-- Anonymous, July 29, 2001