I have to say, we moved to the east coast and lived there for 6 years. Guess what, we hated it. Sure we got a great big house, large yard and the “neighbors” but it wasn’t enough. In the end, we only enjoyed the outdoors about 2 weeks a year (too cold, humid or hot other times), we didn’t have anyone ever visit us so we had no one to share our home with and we had no extracurricular activities.
In a nut shell, we became very depressed and decided that we’d rather spend more money for a place to live that is conducive to our lives rather than live in a mansion in an area that was just not us.
If you enjoy IA, best of luck to you. I personally could never do the midwest, and the east coast was hard (we were only 100 miles from NYC and Boston). Oh yeah, those neighbors really didn’t care about us at all. Not one said goodbye when we left.
We are moving soon and have already became friends with a few neighbors — go figure.
