the hunt begins

Tomorrow morning, I'll be driving out to Front Royal, Virginia to look at apartments. Here in the northern Virginia (NoVA) area, a simple studio apartment can easily run you from $700 to nearly $1000 per month, which is ridiculous. Out in Front Royal, a 2-bedroom, 1.5-bath apartment goes for $725-830 per month. Quite a difference! And if you're working at a job that allows you to use your own computer, it doesn't really matter where you relocate to. My hometown will be only an hour away; it's not as though I'll be cut off from all civilization. Besides, Front Royal is no longer the one-horse town it was decades ago; it's the hub of a burgeoning network of small cities and towns.

I can't hope to move quite yet; I don't have the cash. But in a few months, I see myself out somewhere green, mountainous, and fairly quiet. Part of me has long sought to recapture the feeling from my year in Switzerland. Here in Virginia, we don't have any mountains that even begin to compare to what you find in that part of Europe, but as far as I'm concerned, small mountains will do just fine. More on this later.


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