[mreid]

I preface this by saying peace and love, peace and love to my Porsche brothers and sister who live in or are from CT.

I've lived in 12 states including CT. It was by far the worst state I lived in. The taxes are ridiculous, politics even worse, and overall weather perhaps worse (there were some very beautiful days, but overall not so much). I lived in Branford in an area called Short Beach. My house was beach front on Long Island sound, so I didn't have a lot to complain about from a view or quality of home perspective. I was about 10 minutes from New Haven which is the home of Yale University. I never felt completely safe and CT has some tough gun laws making it more difficult, but not impossible to buy a hand gun (when I was there (2001 to 2010) you had to have a concealed carry permit to buy a hand gun.

I met some really nice people, but more often than not people were cold and not real friendly. Keep in mind that in TX random strangers say hi, smile, and talk to you out of the blue. You are taxed on you cars every year as they have a personal property tax (I hated that) and they are real nazis about pursuing payment even canceling your registration if they think you haven't paid it. I had several run ins with ignorant tax collectors who knew nothing about my cars, but were empowered to determine value with little option for appeal. There are some beautiful driving roads and Lime Rock is less than two hours away. The vintage races over Labor Day weekend are awesome.

In addition to the annual vehicle tax, there are state, property, and sales taxes that make CT one of he highest taxed states in the union. Overall, I'd rate my time in CT as a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10. Sorry.