Places to live

We arrived back from our vacation to Walt Disney World. My son tells us that wants to move there, I told him I wouldn't mind living around there but we have to wait until after David graduates from his PhD program, which will be around 4 years from now. This got David and me to discussing where we wouldn't mind moving to. We started with a list of all 50 states and both of us had our own ideas of what states we did not want to live in. We narrowed it down to 9 states that we would not mind moving to. The following states were the ones we decided we could live in (these are not in any particular order:

Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas

With in those states we said the following cities:

Alabama 
Huntsville, Madison

Arizona 
Phoenix, Mesa, Chandler, Flagstaff, Prescott

California 
San jose, Salinas, Monterey, Santa Maria, Long Beach, Santa Ana, San Diego, Riverside, Palmdale, Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo 

Florida 
Orlando, Ocala, Jacksonville, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Port St. Lucie, Palm Bay, Gainesville 

New Mexico
Santa Fe, Albuquerque

North Carolina
Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Raleigh, Durham, Wilmington

South Carolina 
Columbia, Charleston, Myrtle Beach, Greenville

Tennessee 
Chattanooga, Nashville, Knoxville

Texas
Houston, San Antonio, Dallas/Ft Worth, Austin, College Station

We are planning a family vacation to the Grand Canyon and will see how we like the area. We are also talking in a few years of a family vacation to Washington DC and maybe making a few days detour and checking out the Carolina's. We are somewhat familiar with Tennessee and Florida. My husband lived for about a year in Texas after he graduated with his Bachelor degree and I currently have a couple of cousins living in and around San Antonio and College Station, Texas. We currently live in Alabama and have visited Huntsville area. I have been to California once back in the 80's (before I could drive). Each state and city has its own pros and cons.

We plan on doing research and gathering a nice list of pros and cons and hopefully get some from people that live in those areas, natives and non-natives. We hope to have narrowed down to places we would prefer more over another and what our income required for him for each place, before he graduates. Thankfully we have 4 years to gather this information. We have said that what it really comes down to is, while we may prefer one place more than another, as long as it meets the pay requirements, we will move wherever we have to for his job. All the places that we are looking at have Colleges/University's and/or are big into technology.