Sadly, I think we have a potentially worse season ahead of us up here in the 09-10 season. How unfortunate, that we have a real drought to match the economic one.

Learning new country is always hard, particularly when you don’t have old favorite places that you’ve learned well to rely upon. It changes “checking out a new place” to “have to figure this out” and, as many of us know, it takes a long time and a lot of gas and boot leather to gain useful familiarity with an area. I’ve been in the same place for twenty-some years and am looking at a change sometime in the fairly near future with some trepidation (and interest) for many of the same reasons you describe.