A local mindset is coming:
Choose your new house carefully because your attitude to traveling will evolve. We moved to Durham from the hustle and bustle and dustbowl of Phoenix, AZ. In Phoenix it takes a minimum 20 minutes in the car to get anywhere; some of my closest friends lived 45 minutes away. When we got to the Bull City we brought this travel mentality with us. What we quickly found was that the people we made friends with, who had lived in the Triangle for years, did not share our notion of commute. When we’d tell them we lived in North Gate Park you could watch them workout the drive time calculation. If they lived more than 12 minutes away from us maintaining a viable relationship was tenuous. What ended up happening was that we built close ties with our neighbors-something that doesn’t really happen in Phoenix. We also, unbeknownst to us, adopted the 12 minute drive mentality. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. Here is my advice to transplants. Try to live near where you work. Traffic on the major arteries that run through the Triangle can be murder at rush hour and if it happens to snow; forget about it. If you opt for a suburban local, get an ipod download This American Life and enjoy your drives. If you’d like help picking your new homestead give me a call.