50 STATES: North Carolina

WHEN you come from Zimbabwe and marry someone from New Jersey, there are no easy solutions to finding a place to live where both parties will feel like home. This is how my wife Grace (she’s the Yankee) and I (the Southerner) ended up in London, and then New York, two cities where everyone’s generally from somewhere else.

Cramped little apartments in pleasant neighborhoods with convenient access to a cosmopolitan lifestyle have been the ultimate middle ground for the two of us — our journey ultimately led us to a one-bedroom apartment in Brownstone Brooklyn. Fine for a couple, less adequate when factoring in our two-year-old daughter and brand-new son. Looking around at the walls and feeling them closing in, it’s no wonder that our minds have begun to stray.

Grace has always been a strong advocate of various suburbs in her home state. Compared to present-day Zimbabwe, a New Jersey move certainly makes sense. And yet, I can’t help but think that if we’re leaving New York, we might as well just leave it completely. The promise of easy living and a deep porch was what lead us on a familiarization / house-hunting tour, below the Mason-Dixon line.

An affordable solution, no doubt, but not without its problems. I was gung ho for the actual south – something rich in character, like Louisiana. At the mention of any such foolishness, Grace would roll her eyes and ask if we might consider something a little less drastic, something slightly more neutral. This is how, like so many New Yorkers, we ended up in North Carolina.

As a relatively recent arrival to the United States, North Carolina has always had a certain appeal. How could one not be intrigued by a state that could produce two senators of such divergent political views as John Edwards and Jesse Helms. Mostly, though, I was fascinated by the frequent nods to the livability of unfamiliar towns like Chapel Hill, Wilmington or Asheville, all of which pop up on Best Towns Ever lists fairly regularly. I asked Grace what was so good about these places — she had a vague idea about some of them, others she had barely heard of. So, we flew to Raleigh.

The first thing I noticed was the smell: mint-fresh forests of towering pine rolled to Appalachian horizon and the air seemed scented with azaleas. That was just the airport. We cruised into Chapel Hill on a six-lane highway as smooth as an autobahn.

It wasn’t always so appealing. A famous pre-Civil War expression describes North Carolina as “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.” It referred to the state being a very poor rural farming region sandwiched between the great plantation aristocracies of South Carolina, and the wealth and fine breeding of Virginia to the north.

But North Carolina is having the last laugh. In the 1950s, local business and political leaders, showing the kind of vision missing in much of the US today, set about transforming the north central region around the towns of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill into a center for research and technology.

By the 1970s, IBM and other corporations were moving offices and laboratories here and — boom — the Research Triangle was born. For now — there’s the economic crisis to consider — there are more people with PhDs in the “Triangle” than anywhere else in America, and schools such as Duke, UNC and UNC Chapel Hill, are among the best in the country. It helps explain those “best place to live” lists.

We got our bearings at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn, billed as the classiest historic hotel in North Carolina. Built in 1924 on the edge of the prestigious UNC Chapel Hill campus, it was like stepping onto the set of Gone With the Wind: a colonial façade of towering pillars fronted an immaculate lawn; tapestries and mirrored walls lined its halls.

They barely do afternoon tea in England anymore, but they did here, and we made our way down to a chandeliered, rose-strewn lobby at 4 p.m., where a pianist tinkled jazz tunes and southern matriarchs held court over Devonshire Cream scones and cups of Jasmine Oolong in heirloom China. There were four wedding parties staying at the hotel, and gorgeous young belles and their boys sashayed past with champagne flutes in hand.

I could have people-watched for hours, had a banjo not started up. Having heard banjos mostly in movies growing up, I couldn’t help but find its tone slightly ominous. But when we followed the music outside we found — sipping mint juleps and dancing to a blue-grass quartet on the lawn — what appeared to be the entire population of Chapel Hill out for the hotel’s regular “Fridays on the Front Porch” summer music session. Our daughter, Madeline, was soon making friends by the bandstand. Grace and I marveled at the easy community of it all.

“Hmm … don’t get this at home,” she purred.

Raleigh and Durham are the larger cities of the Triangle, but part of the appeal of the area is that it’s easy to live in a small village or even on a farm, and still be able to commute between any of three towns in half an hour.

I fell hard for Hillsborough, 15 minutes west of Chapel Hill, a genteel, magnolia-splashed hamlet with an historic district comprised of the most beautiful white-washed Antebellum homes this side of Charleston. One mansion (with the kind of porch I’d always imagined) was going for $450,000.

“That’s a studio in Brooklyn!” Grace spluttered.

In a sidewalk café on the main street I overheard a group of locals discussing the latest Jonathan Lethem book. Hillsborough is home to some of North Carolina’s most famous authors, among them Allan Gurganus, whose Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, I had just finished reading. I wondered whether he was sitting at the café that afternoon.

Our one big fear about moving south was the likely lack of good food. But the Triangle has become a gourmands Mecca in recent years, and a Farm-to-Table movement has sprung up, a wave of dynamic young chefs taking advantage of the bountiful produce grown on the farms of the surrounding Piedmont. I had the best eggs benedict of my life at Amy Tornquist’s Watts Grocery in Durham (it came with Andouille Sausage and Crawfish Tail Hollandaise), and later we tucked into succulent yang chow pork with tea-and-spice-smoked chicken, at celebrated Asian fusion restaurant The Lantern in downtown Chapel Hill. Chef-owner Andrea Reusing had opened the restaurant after moving down from New York and discovering, to her horror, there was no Asian food in town. A few years later, the recently departed Gourmet magazine was rating The Lantern one of the best 50 restaurants in America.

Then there was the cheese. On day four we checked out of the Carolina Inn and into the Inn at Celebrity Dairy, a rustic, working goat farm outside Pittsboro, 30 minutes west of Durham. The dairy makes a delectably creamy chevre that it sells to farm markets and restaurants throughout the Triangle. Best of all, you get to stay on the farm. Madeline took a shine to the goats at milking hour, and in the evenings Grace and I sipped Rose on the wood porch, ate that chevre and watched fireflies light up the fields in front of the 1800-built farmhouse. It had six rooms but we were the only guests and if it wasn’t for the ear shattering squawk of the farm’s pet peacock at night, we may never have left.

The Triangle’s other lure is that Asheville and the Smoky Mountains are only three hours west, and the coast three hours the other way. We wanted time at the beach, and going on the principle that we were more likely to move to a town where there was work to be had, gave the Outer Banks a miss and drove to historic Wilmington, on the Cape Fear coast.

Thanks to actor Robert Mitchum, even I had heard of Cape Fear. But I knew nothing about Wilmington, so it came as something of a surprise to discover that the city is home to the largest movie studio in America outside of Los Angeles (Screen Gems Studios) and known locally as “East Hollywood”. Dozens of feature films are shot here, as is One Tree Hill. Katie Holmes lived in town when it was the location for Dawson’s Creek.

Given the name Cape Fear, I’d half expected a rugged, rock strewn port with a population of delinquent jail breakers. Instead, the 300-block historic district was like a live-in Victorian museum. Horse-drawn carriages trotted tourists past spectacular 18th century colonial mansions; vintage river boats cruised the Cape Fear; locals in top hats touted ghost tours down oak-lined streets. Wilmington had for me the air of a more well-behaved New Orleans Garden District. It was hip, too. In a formerly run-down area of port warehouses, beloved local resident Linda Lavin, star of “Alice”, and her much younger musician-actor husband, Steve Bakunas, had established a cutting edge theater group, Red Barn Studio.

Since we had already stayed in a colonial hotel and on a farm, and spent a lot of time marveling at Antebellum architecture, we decided to go modern here, and we checked into a resort on Wrightsville Beach, Shell Island. While we’d loved the villages of the Triangle, this setting led to some confusion. We woke every morning at the hotel to a glorious view from our 10th floor balcony of white sand, turquoise water and dolphins surfing the waves.

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “Maybe we need to look for a beach condo.”

For more information about travel to North Carolina, log on to visitnc.com. Rogers is the author of “The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe“, learn more at douglasrogers.org.