The White Oak River near Swansboro, NC

Having spent three summers traveling the coasts of Virginia and North Carolina while looking for a pleasant place to call our home away from home, I decided that our experiences were worth sharing. How we approached solving our problem, might provide others with insight into how to quickly find a place that they like. It's also been fun figuring out that even the relatively small area of coastal Virginia and North Carolina has an amazing variety of places to enjoy.

The whole process has been a good education and put many things we experienced over the years into perspective.

What looks good to us, might scare some folks right back to their city homes. One of the interesting things we've found is that the most manicured and controlled environments might not exactly be what we want. While it looks really pretty to drive through some of these places, we lived under the control of the Columbia, Md. architectural police for a couple of years. Having some reasonable covenants and restrictions in the deeds protects everyone, but it can get out of control.

You will find some brief information about different areas on this site. Right up front you have to remember that for one reason or another I've rejected those spots which might turn out to be just perfect for you.

While having twenty golf courses within a few miles might give me the shakes, lots of people would think that they have died and gone to heaven. The idea that the area is a great spot for sport fishing means little if you're not interesting in fishing.

If being a gourmet cook and staying at home to enjoy your own cooking is your cup of tea, then having lots of year round restaurants might be of little use.

Perhaps the hardest thing to convey is that finding a place you like means finding a spot where you're comfortable with the people around you. If you are like we are, striking up a conversation with someone isn't very difficult. Finding out where the people in a neighbor come from sometimes helps. Just walking around a neighborhood can be an education.

We had stopped to get a flyer once from a box in front of a house. A neighborhood lady flagged us down and spent forty five minutes talking about the neighborhood and telling us which houses were well constructed. It actually made us seriously consider the area.

What I don't want my site to become is a place which pitches any one place as the best place on earth for everyone. We all have different goals and things we enjoy. This site is how we got to place which we hope we'll enjoy for the next few years.

We have lived on an isolated farm in New Brunswick, Canada and an even more isolated one on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Annapolis County, Nova Scotia. In fact I can even get Google maps to mark a spot any closer than five miles to our first home in Saint Croix Cove. We moved from the farm in New Brunswick to the manicured suburbs of Halifax, Nova Scotia and then on to the world of architecturally controlled Columbia, Maryland half way between Baltimore and Washington. From there we moved to a mountainside overlooking Roanoke, Virginia, but we also ended up owning a home in "Mayberry" or more correctly Mount Airy, North Carolina where we both grew up. It's been a great journey with lot of unique stops.

We have seen lots of beauty in the world especially if you throw in our travels to places as far away as New Zealand. It has convinced me that we live in a wonderful world in spite of all the challenges we read about in the paper each day. I think you can find heaven on earth right under your nose or three hundred miles away on the coast, it just depends on what can add some spring to your step.