That was pretty much my intuition too, once I actually thought about it.

For context, this is on my mind because I'm graduating from college in a year. I'm still figuring out my values and their relative importances. (I'm going to make a post about it later, if I'm still unsure after talking it over with myself and my friends.) I've heard that the Southwest has a lower cost of living than the rest of the country, and some areas have nice weather, but beyond that I don't know a whole lot about what it's like living there. (I'm on study abroad in Sydney now, and noticing that I go outside more when in an interesting neighborhood with nice weather.)

At the moment, all the cities near the top of my mental list are in the northeast US. I'm pretty sure that's at least partly because that's the only region I've stayed in for more than a couple weeks at a time, and I'm slightly homesick at the moment. Probably what I should do is do a bit of research now and write down what I'm thinking, and then come back to it once I've come back to my hometown and had some time to get bored of it, and maybe again during my last semester of college. It's probably not worth trying to evaluate places out of driving distance of Pennsylvania until I stop being homesick, now that I think of it that way.