OT where to live, Where is a great place to live. Options

[Porcharu]

My job will soon be a "work from home deal" and I should be able to live anywhere that I can get broadband and within a few hours of an airport. Any suggestions on a place that is both car and family friendly?

[lapuwali]

An impossible question. What works for you may not work for me or anyone else. The only real thing you can do is travel and decide for yourself.

I lived all over the country while I was growing up (military brat), and day to day the single biggest difference I saw was climate, so if you're really used to NoCal weather, you may just try to move to somewhere else in NoCal. Local politics and attitudes can make a difference over the long haul, though you can usually find enclaves of NoCal liberalism even in the Deep South. You can also find radical right-wingers in New England. College towns tend to be more politically liberal no matter where they are.

If by "car friendly" you mean something less restrictive than CA, don't count on loose attitudes in other places lasting forever. Laws change. CA used to be much more restrictive than it used to be fairly recently (you had to get a 1970 914 smogged as recently as 1997).

Family friendly is also a relative term. If you're primarily thinking of being able to afford more space for a family than you can in Campbell, then you can simply move to Sacramento, or into the Sierras, where you can still get housing for 1/3rd of Bay Area prices. Little towns like Winters are an option, too (easy drive to Sac airport). If your idea of family friendly is more political, that's something you'll have to research and decide yourself. The Midwest is vastly cheaper than either coast, with housing and land typically running only 15-20% of CA prices. The weather takes some getting used to, with hot, muggy summers and bitterly cold winters. You can use something like realtor.com to investigate housing prices, and weather.com to look at historical climate averages.