Why we live where we do

What a fascinating thread, thanks for sharing your stories. 
I'm another one who's moved around a bit, escaping suburban Reading (so boring!) for uni in rural Lampeter. Work as an itinerant archaeologist took me from Berkshire to Brittany via Leeds, Nottingham, Milton Keynes and the Isle of Man before I landed a permanent job in Oxford.
A career change took me to London via County Cork in Ireland. I was then made redundant after just a couple of months so took the plunge and moved to Plymouth and in with MrPP. 
After 8 years there he was offered a job in Berkhampstead so we moved to a gorgeous house with a fabulous mature garden in a village on the Beds/Bucks border. Sadly the job didn't work out and the local drug dealers used our front wall so we were relieved to move on. Back (for me) to Oxfordshire, to Abingdon, then Kennington and finally to Headington in Oxford.
There we hatched our ten year plan to earn enough to move to France and the mountains. As skiers and bikers who wanted to self build, we chose the Pyrénées over the Alps because here we could buy a sunny south facing 3000m plot 40 mins from the heart of the mountains for the same price as a tiny plot that only saw the sun in the summer months!
And here we are, thirteen years on, and the house is about ready for a redecoration, the garden design is complete and it is starting to mature nicely. When we get too old to manage the place we'll head into the nearest town,  Bagnères de Bigorre and a flat in the heart of the town centre. 
As an aside, we were in the early stages of relocating to Quebec when 9/11 happened, but MrPP's job offer disappeared with the hit on the aircraft industry.