Over the past few years, I’ve been spending an increasing percentage of my time on the road – a trend that looks likely to continue, as, just in the next month, I’m slated to head out to Washington (D.C.), San Francisco, Israel and Bermuda. (Rough, I know.)

Through all my traveling thus far, I’ve made a few discoveries. The first, that I don’t need that much ‘stuff’ to be happy, is immensely pleasing in a Walden-esque sort of way. Living out of suitcases, I find I rarely miss the things I’ve left behind. Which has inspired me, already a ruthless reducer of possessions, to further clean out my closets.

Another thing I’ve noticed, however, is that trips of different lengths seem to have different feels to them. For vacations, very short trips (three to five days) seem to work best for me. After that, any additional relaxation I gain from pulling myself out of real life accrues increasingly slowly with each added day – a textbook case of diminishing returns. Worse, I start to find that all of the work I managed to push completely out of my head for the first few days begins to creep back in, preventing me from fully enjoying my escape.

As a result, I’ve realized I’m better breaking two weeks of yearly vacation into three or four shorter trips, spread through the year. Each one, then, is just long enough for me to pull myself completely out of my fast-paced life, and comes frequently enough that I rarely have to go for extended stretches without an upcoming escape in sight.

Five days, I’ve found, is also long enough to do the tourist thing in a city I’ve never before visited – long enough to see the sites, wander through a few museums, browse thorough kitschy knick-knacks I fortunately never purchase. Even doubling that to ten days, I’ve found, makes very little difference. Sure, I get to see a few more sights, perhaps wander more slowly through the museums. But, by the end, I still feel like a tourist – with a vague sense of the city, perhaps, but certainly not like I really know it.

At the one month, mark, however, I’ve found that I start to feel like I really own a city – I have a sense of the neighborhoods, have found a few off-the-beaten-path secret spots, get some sort of feel for the city as a whole. It’s a completely different feeling from the touristy shorter trips, and I find that when I return to a city I’ve lived in – even lived in for just a one month stretch – it feels slightly more like a homecoming than an outbound visit.

I really like that homecoming feeling, and, as I’m lucky enough have jobs (both on the film and tech sides) that can be done pretty much anywhere, it’s something I’ve recently resolved to experience more often. So, along with my business trips, along with my frequent short vacations, I’ll also be trying to take a month a year to live and work someplace I’ve never lived and worked before. With Manhattan rents so ridiculously high, I suspect I can sublet my apartment, and use the income to cover not only rent in another city, but even the cost of a flight to get there.

I can’t relocate for a month immediately, as I’ll be all over the place for the next three (mostly related to two tech consulting gigs and a documentary we’re getting ready to shoot in Israel and Europe). But my schedule should calm down by November, and I’m hoping to use that eye in the work storm to test out the one month move plan. So, after that exceedingly long-winded introduction, I should now admit that the entire point of this post is to ask for help in determining exactly where I should relocate.

Currently, at the top of my list are Vancouver, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and possibly Paris. My roommate James is lobbying hard for Asheville, NC (‘the Paris of the South’). But it’s still pretty much up in the air. So, if you have ideas, throw ’em in the fray (ideally with some explanation of why I should choose that locale). If you convince me, I’ll even break from tradition, finally buying one of those kitschy knick-knacks to send back as thanks.