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I live near a fairly big city. Not a huge one, but one that is definitely going through some major expansion. We've got sports teams and concerts and all that. I live in the suburbs (deed restricted) a couple of towns over, right at the edge of farmland essentially. I can hear cows mooing from my backyard hammock (which I love). A short drive and I am at an intersection which I call Town that has 3 grocery stores, 1 liquor store, 1 hardware store, 1 auto parts store, 1 pool supply store, 2 gyms, 1 crossfit gym, 1 sports supply store, 2 barber shops, 2 chinese take outs, 1 starbucks, 1 pizza place, 1 panera bread, 1 sush place, 1 super walmart, 1 verizon store, 1 petsmart, 2 bars, 1 chili's restaurant, several fast food, 2 ice cream places, 2 gas stations, 2 dry cleaners, 1 YMCA, and some other random shops. Oh, and building a small hospital there too. This all sits at one intersection about 3 miles from my home. Home Depot and Lowes sit across from each other a short distance away. There is even more in the rest of the town further away.

I have it easy. I really do. Not ashamed to admit it. I am also fairly close to the beach to top all that off.

However, I have traveled around the country and spend time in North Carolina every couple of years, and I love visiting the Arizona/Utah/Montana areas too. My favorite areas are the rural ones. I am always amazed how far people can live away from the convenience of urban areas, let alone what they might do for careers, and how far they might have to travel for them.

I really do not like cities. I do not like living in congested areas. But I haven't lived in a remote area either. Do any of you? I want to hear what that is like. I know as gamers it might be frustrating, and I am sure the grass is greener on the other side for everyone, but part of me CRAVES small town life and more space and freedom. I am kind of bound to my area due to family otherwise I probably would make the jump. But that being said, I am also sure there are some who live remotely would love to be able to go into my 'town' above on a saturday morning and run all my errands at one intersection too. But if you have woods in your backyard and distance between neighbors, part of me is really jealous. How much time do you spend commuting to work? And what is running errands or just shopping like?

I used to live in rural Western Oklahoma when I was still in High School, graduated from a combined school for two towns, with a graduating class of 43 people. We used to joke that the highlight of our town was watching the stoplight change colors, but then the stoplight broke and the intersection became a 4-way stop.

Our town really didn't have much employment options in town, unless you were lucky enough to be a clerk in one of the two gas stations in town or the one Dairy Queen knock-off. We used to have a small grocery store, but it shut down because there just weren't enough people living there to support it. It was a 30 minute commute to the edge of the nearest city, where most of us would work after school. Which also meant a 30+ minute drive for groceries, pharmacy, doctor, really anything. If "city kids" would go to the mall for fun, we would go to the (non-24 hour) Walmart for entertainment. We would "drag main street" on Friday nights.

Then when I went to college I moved to a "big" city with a movie theater that had 3 screens!

It has a certain romantic charm, but it's also a practical pain in the rear. But part of that comes down to planing your life around your location. Better planning for your grocery shopping (rather than my current habit of needing something from there every day). You gotta make sure you have enough gas in your tank to get somewhere in case you need to make an emergency trip in the middle of the night when the gas station is closed. You gotta be more prepared to be snowed in for 3 or more days. If you have kids, your options for medical care or sitters are very limited.

As far as gaming, we formed our own little club in High School and were able to reserve the common room at the town hall once a month for playing games. But there were no stores, that's for sure. The closest store that sold MtG was 45 minutes away (that was before the days where you could pick up boosters at Walmart), and the closet "real" gaming store was a 2 hour drive into Oklahoma City.

Would you ever go back to something like that or are you too used to the convenience of urban living? Assuming you could still have some career out there.

I've lived in some small towns in the prairies for training, but being close to military bases means the towns always have at least one Boston Pizza, so I've never been that far removed from civilization.

I was born in a city, raised in the suburbs, and now I live in the suburbs of a city I quite like. I like urban areas, and I'd happily live in a loft in or near downtown if my work was closer to downtown. My wife loves rural areas, and fortunately, out here, ~30mins from the downtown core (not city limits, right downtown) is nothing but lakes and cottage country. Figure we'll split the difference and buy a small amount of land that is close to the city for me (no more than 30mins to city limits), but enough land and ruraliness for her to enjoy the outdoors.

I don't enjoy camping, or other extended outdoors activities. I've always felt comfortable in urban areas. When I travel, I love nothing more than finding a nice licensed establishment, and sitting on the patio enjoying the bustle of the city.

I'll be happy regardless no matter where I am if I have good internet, a nice car, and good roads.

Ah I see. I am quite the opposite in that I love nature too. I would rather see trees and lakes versus cars and buildings.

Its also interesting that your wife likes the rural part. Most peeps I know, the guys prefer the rural part, and the women the urban.

 KTG17 wrote:
Ah I see. I am quite the opposite in that I love nature too. I would rather see trees and lakes versus cars and buildings.

I love me a good mountain, or forest for that matter. My new house backs on to a protected green space of dense forest with a creek running through it visible from my back deck. My appreciation of nature ends there though. I want to protect it and look at it, I just don't want to be in it.

Plus, I could watch a busy road all day admiring nice cars while drinking.

Our retirement plan so far seems like a good compromise.

That said, I would consider living in a fairly rural area in two parts of this country; the interior of BC, or Vancouver Island. I may not enjoy the outdoors much, but I love to snowboard, and BC is a wonderful province with lots of great little communities.

Career prospects are definitely a challenge for many. I work in healthcare, so there is usually always a job somewhere for me although it would probably involve driving to one of the larger towns that has a hospital. My wife is a therapist, so on one hand rural areas are usually chronically under-served when it comes to mental health but on the other hand the uninsured rate is also pretty high so getting reimbursed for practice is a challenge as well. On top of that are the usual child care issues, which can be exacerbated in rural areas.

We might consider going back to a rural area once our kids are a little older and both are in grade school at least. There are a lot of very rural areas I could PCS to which are basically in the middle of nowhere, and doing a tour in one of those places would look very favorable on my promotion sheets down the line. So it's always something that's in the back of our mind. My wife also grew up in a very small rural town in western Oklahoma, so we are both used to the experience.

For me, the biggest issue (especially here in Oklahoma and other southern states) is that I have biracial kids and I always worry about them being the only minority in a school. Many small-towns here are still very segregated and from personal experiences there is still a pretty strong racial undercurrent present. I realize that the fear of prejudice makes me prejudicial towards small towns, but it is something that is present in the back of my mind. So unless we "had" to go to a rural town, I don't know if we would.

With that said, I have it in my head that a tour in Saranac Lake, NY would be a wonderful experience.

Grew up moving around tiny little country towns. Our nearest 'city' was 6500 people more than an hour away. Towns had Post Office, 'corner store', and maybe a cafe, along with a swimming pool. The one on the Highway had a tiny little chain grocery store-4 aisles. Roadhouse served as combination pub/hotel/social club. Closest actual city was 2.5 hrs away.

It sucks. If you've got kids you'll severely limit their social experiences-because all their friends live too far to walk. There were lots of arsons/joyrides because there was nothing else to do.

Employment prospects are limited. Entertainment is severely limited. Because the communities are insular, they have expectations and views that are odd, intrusive, or bigoted.
Anytime anything happens, everyones got an opinion. A 15 year old school mate of mine had his father kill himself in a drunk driving accident, and the gak he copped while dealing with that was insane. You cop real crap from people for nothing.

If you get hurt, or sick, you need to be prepared to drive. If you need food, prepare to pay $8 for a loaf of bread, or $5 for a litre of milk. There's no conveniences available, and going to the city is a logistical nightmare, because you're shopping $2000 of groceries at a time.

I love bushwalking, and reading, and that saved my childhood. I'm doing extended tertiary studies in environment, and you meet some lovely people. But that's not enough sustain you.

Personally, settle in the suburbs. Be 15mins away from shopping centres, have a library, social joints everywhere. And when you want nature, drive an hour. It's better to take the inconvenience to do that, than cut your hand and have a frantic hr drive to hospital, or suffer all the crap that comes your way.


Just my $0.02, from my experiences.

 Blacksails wrote:
That said, I would consider living in a fairly rural area in two parts of this country; the interior of BC, or Vancouver Island. I may not enjoy the outdoors much, but I love to snowboard, and BC is a wonderful province with lots of great little communities.

If snowboarding is your thing I recommend the interior, somewhere like Vernon. On the Island there is only Mt. Washington, and while it is a decent mountain it is very coastal, which means the snow is very wet and heavy, which makes for less than ideal runs.

I am very lucky, I get to live and work in a picture postcard urban city, but a 30 minute drive and I'm off in the woods. Our provincial parks system is pretty great too. I spent the camping weekend in the woods, totally in nature with the deer and eagles and seals and all that jazz, but also if there was an emergency it was a ten minute drive to the nearest Tim Horton's.

I like living in a city. Never really lived anywhere else. Though we do have a nice dacha in the mountains. It is quite remote (about one hour drive to the nearest village, then about 30 minutes to a city), but not super remote. It does not have electricity or running water, so it does often feel really remote. We sometimes stay there for a month or two. It is a great place to go hunting and mountainbiking and just enjoy the quiet.
But as much as I love being outside in nature, I would never want to live in a remote village or something like that. People who live in such places tend to be really weird in my experience. And usually not in a pleasant way. It is not for nothing that alcoholism and suicide are relatively common in such places. Not to mention extreme boredom.
I do love nature however, and any city where I'd want to live should be surrounded by significant areas of nature where you can go biking. It also should not be too large. I do not like large cities, they are too crowded and it takes too long to get out of them into nature. Cities with a population between 100,000 and 500,000 are the best cities, and the best possible place to live imo.

Iowa boy here. My hometown is about 8500 in population. Going to college I got into gaming, and started to be amazed that more than gas stations, grocery stores, and Wal Mart were open 24 hours per day.

After graduation I got stuck in the cubicle life, and stuff started to suck pretty fast. Yes, the money was terrific, but I looked at my older brother (12 years older and in the same field) and knew my life was headed somewhere I didn't want.

I moved back to my hometown, bought a business, got married, bought a house, and had kids. Sure, I took a 50% pay cut, but still making a decent living. It's also nice that a 3000 Square foot home with 1.3 acres of land has a mortgage similar to what I was paying for rent on a 2-bedroom apartment in a larger city. We live in one of the lowest cost of living areas in the country.

We live on the edge of town. Looking out the front windows we see the city, out the back windows is woods. We live in an area that has almost no predatory or poisonous animals, so the kids can enjoy the large lawn.

Most daily necessities are in town. Everything from contractors to food. We even have a "beach". Yes, it's a lake beach, but the sand is very fine and well maintained, and the water is blue.

Specialty items (Warhammer stores) are in Omaha, about 65 miles away. We do this about once every 5-6 weeks. It's not a big deal if you can make a list, and have a car with a huge trunk for Sam's Club visits (toilet paper by the pallet for the win).

My daily commute one-way is under 3 minutes.

 cuda1179 wrote:
Iowa boy here. My hometown is about 8500 in population. Going to college I got into gaming, and started to be amazed that more than gas stations, grocery stores, and Wal Mart were open 24 hours per day.

After graduation I got stuck in the cubicle life, and stuff started to suck pretty fast. Yes, the money was terrific, but I looked at my older brother (12 years older and in the same field) and knew my life was headed somewhere I didn't want.

I moved back to my hometown, bought a business, got married, bought a house, and had kids. Sure, I took a 50% pay cut, but still making a decent living. It's also nice that a 3000 Square foot home with 1.3 acres of land has a mortgage similar to what I was paying for rent on a 2-bedroom apartment in a larger city. We live in one of the lowest cost of living areas in the country.

We live on the edge of town. Looking out the front windows we see the city, out the back windows is woods. We live in an area that has almost no predatory or poisonous animals, so the kids can enjoy the large lawn.

Most daily necessities are in town. Everything from contractors to food. We even have a "beach". Yes, it's a lake beach, but the sand is very fine and well maintained, and the water is blue.

Specialty items (Warhammer stores) are in Omaha, about 65 miles away. We do this about once every 5-6 weeks. It's not a big deal if you can make a list, and have a car with a huge trunk for Sam's Club visits (toilet paper by the pallet for the win).

My daily commute one-way is under 3 minutes.

Ok this sounds like what I am looking for I think.

I haven't lived truly remotely, about the closest ive come is about an hour and a half from a large city in a town just large enough to merit its own (non24hr) Walmart while finishing my undergrad for a couple of years. It wasnt bad as someone just there for a couple of years for a specific purpose, but had some issues depending on where you were in life otherwise.

My experience there was that it was great living for people who were retired or worked good local jobs (usually local gov or college)/worked from home and didnt have kids and enjoyed low key lives, it was a blast. Low expenses, lots of room, easy journeys to outdoors destinations, etc. For students, it was neat for largely the same reasons and campus provided a lot of "city style" stuff and events.

For kids and young adults, well, despite being surrounded by lots of wilderness and outdoor activities, Meth got real popular for a reason, and those with any prospects left as soon as they turned 18 if they didnt go to the college in town and never moved back. The worst issues we had on campus were always nonstudent locals that made their way into campus party.

Aside from that, the only jobs in town were either at the college, local city/county, and service sector. Pay was generally not great, opportunities for advancement were nonexistent for the most part.

Traffic was also not unknown. You dont need a whole lot of people to get traffic when the roads are one lane each way and riddled with stoplights at awkward points. Cops crusing to make quota were also a real thing, as it made up a huge chunk of their revenue. To get certain things, you had to make a plan a trip out of town and accept that not everything was available 24/7 within a 10 minute drive, and that could be everything from Gyros to medical care.

Tldr, a smallish town was great as a college student, would be great for people without kids living low key lives, not so great for kids or people looking to get ahead.

One thing to keep in mind with the "best of both worlds" approach, is that for the most parts cities will keep on growing.

We have a good crowd of NIMBYs who are currently fighting the expansion of a highway. Their argument is that they are living in the country, and they want to keep on living in the country, and if they wanted a highway near their house they would have moved in the city.

The problem with these particular folks is that they actually are living in the city. In Oklahoma City, our city limits are huge and the city takes up over 620 square miles (1,606.67 km2 for our metric friends). This includes a lot of rural land, and a lot of people decided to take advantage of living "rural" while also still living inside the city in order to enjoy city utilities, city schools districts, city police and fire departments, etc. They are living inside the city, but they don't want the city near them.

So if you are looking to live "on the edge", be sure you know where the actual edge is and what your area could be looking like 10-20 years down the line. Our house was build on the very edge of the city (still a suburban style development, so no rural living) 9 years ago, and since then the streets around us were all turned into 4 lane city streets, and strip malls have come to surround our subdivision. We didn't try to escape city life in a rural setting, we just came here for the cheaper land and new construction. But then, so came everybody else!

I will admit there are some downsides I don't like about my town. There are of couple of housing developments just outside of town, and a number of acreages. Some of these places are literally one step over the border of the city. They aren't part of the town, and SHOULD be on rural water/electricity plans and not have their roads maintained by the city. However, they still have this done for them.

I'm not opposed to them having these things, but I don't like that they don't actually pay any taxes that go into paying for these things. They are technically outside the city's ability to tax them, but still get the services.

 cuda1179 wrote:
I will admit there are some downsides I don't like about my town. There are of couple of housing developments just outside of town, and a number of acreages. Some of these places are literally one step over the border of the city. They aren't part of the town, and SHOULD be on rural water/electricity plans and not have their roads maintained by the city. However, they still have this done for them.

I'm not opposed to them having these things, but I don't like that they don't actually pay any taxes that go into paying for these things. They are technically outside the city's ability to tax them, but still get the services.

I don't know the specifics in your state, but there are a couple areas where cities do that here. For example, there was a small subdivision in the Fire Protection District where I used to volunteer. The southern border of the district went to the county line, and south of that county line was inside the city limits. We had hydrants maintained by a County Rural Water District, but there was one subdivision that bordered the county line on city water and hydrants (we liked filling up there, because the pressure was better and it wouldn't take as long to fill up a bunch of trucks and tankers with water). We asked why the city would bother with running water mains outside of city limits and into the rural area, and the explanation we got is for any potential expansions of the city limits in the future. I guess if the city can show that they have provided and maintained utility service in a rural area, it can help them with any arguments for annexing those rural areas in the future and help fold them into the city limits.

So your town might be just being neighborly, but maybe they are also keeping the potential to annex those areas in the future in mind.

My county has a pop of a little shy of 20k people, with 7k living in the largest town/city limits. Our home is about 15 minutes out through the river bottoms, which during the flood season we have to take a slightly lingering route around with usually about 5ft or water or more sitting on the road. We’ve got my distant relatives cattle running along our property, with our house on a hill overlooking their fields. There’s a waterfowl conservation area closer to the river on the other side of their fields. We’ve had to deal with coyotes attacking the dog, snakes on the attic, and foxes/possums taking our chickens. Most poisonous snakes stick to the ponds and streams so we don’t have to worry about them much. Black widows are occasionally a problem, but a boot takes care of that. Carpenter bees do their best to devourer our barn, and this year Japanese beetles have been after my pecan trees. My father has about 15 acres down the road I hunt on, and my wife has been getting into foraging. Lately we’ve been gathering blackberries(she makes a mean cobbler), and chanterelle mushrooms thanks to all the rain.

Job options are fairly limited in the area, with the city council wanting to focus on making the area a retirement community, with a side of tourism thanks to the battlefield and lake in the area. Best job you can get is at the Paper Mill, aside from self-employment which varies. Various factories, trucking companies, and saw mills in the area get some employed. Meth and other drugs have hit the area hard; there’s been a few shootings in town the past few days thanks to dealers from Memphis coming to collect. My wife works asgraphic design manager at a sign company in town which has contracts with franchises and companies across the nation. Based out of the area they have access to cheap labor, but that’s starting to bite them in the behind since there aren’t many skilled workers either. I work with my father learning his business drilling soil borings across the southeast, mostly sticking to Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. We generally drive around 100-200 miles/day to reach various jobs and back again.

We make decent money(and don’t have kids), so we occasionally take weekend trips to Nashville(TN), Tupelo(MS), or Huntsville(AL). Try to avoid Memphis as much as possible unless we’re visiting friends, or hitting up the IKEA. I can’t complain, and enjoy the area very much. We’re not roughing it in the wilderness, but we generally don’t have to worry about trick are treaters during Halloween. Gaming takes the form of our little club having monthly meetings, and rarely attending a store event(usually about 40miles away or more). We also take turns hosting game nights/parties at our homes, usually around holidays. We have modern amenities(internet, water, electricity, gas), but we do have a well if times get hard. Wife keeps a container garden up, and we have plans to make some raised garden beds next year with maybe a few rows for squash and corn.

 KTG17 wrote:
Ah I see. I am quite the opposite in that I love nature too. I would rather see trees and lakes versus cars and buildings.

Its also interesting that your wife likes the rural part. Most peeps I know, the guys prefer the rural part, and the women the urban.

My wife also prefers rural while I prefer urban. We live in the suburbs but go camping three or four times a year and go hiking in nature preserves far too often. I would never want to live away from a city. When we've visited NYC, my wife became claustrophobic from all of the tall buildings while I felt like I was home.

My sister in law has lived most of her life in San Francisco. She decided to live in a small town (actually a "large city" in the Midwest) and went crazy in about a year and had to move back. I'm pretty sure I would experience the same issues.

 Sinful Hero wrote:
My county has a pop of a little shy of 20k people, with 7k living in the largest town/city limits. Our home is about 15 minutes out through the river bottoms, which during the flood season we have to take a slightly lingering route around with usually about 5ft or water or more sitting on the road. We’ve got my distant relatives cattle running along our property, with our house on a hill overlooking their fields. There’s a waterfowl conservation area closer to the river on the other side of their fields. We’ve had to deal with coyotes attacking the dog, snakes on the attic, and foxes/possums taking our chickens. Most poisonous snakes stick to the ponds and streams so we don’t have to worry about them much. Black widows are occasionally a problem, but a boot takes care of that. Carpenter bees do their best to devourer our barn, and this year Japanese beetles have been after my pecan trees. My father has about 15 acres down the road I hunt on, and my wife has been getting into foraging. Lately we’ve been gathering blackberries(she makes a mean cobbler), and chanterelle mushrooms thanks to all the rain.

Job options are fairly limited in the area, with the city council wanting to focus on making the area a retirement community, with a side of tourism thanks to the battlefield and lake in the area. Best job you can get is at the Paper Mill, aside from self-employment which varies. Various factories, trucking companies, and saw mills in the area get some employed. Meth and other drugs have hit the area hard; there’s been a few shootings in town the past few days thanks to dealers from Memphis coming to collect. My wife works asgraphic design manager at a sign company in town which has contracts with franchises and companies across the nation. Based out of the area they have access to cheap labor, but that’s starting to bite them in the behind since there aren’t many skilled workers either. I work with my father learning his business drilling soil borings across the southeast, mostly sticking to Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. We generally drive around 100-200 miles/day to reach various jobs and back again.

We make decent money(and don’t have kids), so we occasionally take weekend trips to Nashville(TN), Tupelo(MS), or Huntsville(AL). Try to avoid Memphis as much as possible unless we’re visiting friends, or hitting up the IKEA. I can’t complain, and enjoy the area very much. We’re not roughing it in the wilderness, but we generally don’t have to worry about trick are treaters during Halloween. Gaming takes the form of our little club having monthly meetings, and rarely attending a store event(usually about 40miles away or more). We also take turns hosting game nights/parties at our homes, usually around holidays. We have modern amenities(internet, water, electricity, gas), but we do have a well if times get hard. Wife keeps a container garden up, and we have plans to make some raised garden beds next year with maybe a few rows for squash and corn.

Okay another amazing story. And I love Tennessee btw. Great state. I saw my first bear in the wild on a trail in Tennessee and will never forget it.

That whole area is amazing. West NC and West SC (Devil's Fork is one of my favorite secret places in the east), northern GA and TN. I can spend weeks driving around that area exploring and camping everywhere. Not sure how the winters are. There are some mountain roads have no guard rails and if you go off, NO ONE IS EVER GOING TO KNOW WHERE YOU WENT. My family rents a house on Lake Lure, NC every couple of years so that's how I have come to know that area.

Maybe I should move to Asheville.

Winter in SouthWest Tennessee is fairly mild compared to the northern states. Temperatures stay around the 40’s and upper 30’s. It’ll snow maybe 2-3 times a year, with the occasional
Ice storm that basically stops all traffic aside from the main roads. Snow rarely accumulates, and is usually gone within a week or so when it does. Our county has salt trucks and one or two plows that keep the main roads open during the few days it snows, or when the rain has a chance to freeze.

[quote=KTG17 760217 10059046 9381d5f5968172a9e6b2067331322ec3.png I love visiting the Arizona/Utah/Montana areas too.?

I was a peace corps volunteer, and lived in a small village in West Africa with no electricity, no running water, no pavement. That was pretty rural. Culture shock was also pretty extreme. For the most part, I loved it - but that was in large part because I knew after two years I'd be going home.

While I love the outdoors and rural areas, I'm very much a city boy at heart. I don't think I'd ever want to live long-term too far from a major metropolitan area.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, and my time in the peace corps was pretty good for gaming. I lived next door (about 15 miles away) from another volunteer who gamed, and while we didn't do any tabletop wargames, we did have a number of hex-and-counter options, for example:

I live in a fairly rural place, but not at all remote by Alaskan standards. I live on the road system, therefore I can drive to town and get groceries pretty much whenever I was (it's about a 1.5 hour drive to the nearest town that has a WalMart though, and that's not a 24 hour one). There are a communities in Alaska that have thousands of people and big stores like WalMart but are only accessible by boat or plane.

According to Wikipedia my town has a population of a little less than 500. That seems a little high to me, but then again we're not officially a town but rather an "unincorporated community" or somesuch that covers a pretty large area, including some places that I would consider to be other communities. I grew up here, and when I was younger I remember the official population was about 350, but there were actually more stores and restaurants open back then. Now we have a gas station/restaurant and one other gas station/restaurant that is only open during the summer.

I grew up quite a ways up the road, almost out of town. It was a poorly maintained gravel road, and it wasn't unusual for us to get snowed in for a week or two at a time. Theoretically we had a generator, an electric pump for a well and a propane stove and refrigerator. It seemed like those were all broken more often than not. We almost never had running water or a refrigerator, we had a working generator maybe half the time, and propane for the stove about 75% of the time. No land-line, of course, and cellphones weren't readily available until I was maybe fifteen or sixteen.

I had a freaking blast growing up. I got to read books, play in the creek, shoot targets, swim in the lake, pick berries, go skiing, start fires, go hunting and fishing and do all sorts of cool stuff all the time. I also regularly would go to my grandparent's homestead (~11 miles away) where there were cows, chickens, occasionally pigs and a huge garden. I had some gamer friends in school, and our parents were friends, so I got to play a lot of DnD and other games. It wasn't a matter of just walking down the street, but one friend lived only seven or eight miles away so it wasn't a big deal to bicycle over to his house in the summer. It was also fairly normal (probably do to distance) for friends to stay over at each other's houses for several days at a time when I was growing up, which could make for some great DnD campaigns. My brother played Warhammer and MtG with me, but he was the only one and the nearest game store was ~2.5 hours away.

I guess there were inconveniences, but for the most part they didn't bother me because I was used to them. I had no expectation that many things would and should be convenient, so it didn't dawn on me to get mad about it. Drugs and poverty were a problem. My school had about a ~50% dropout rate, and when the teachers were striking the ones at my school got an exemption as they had well-paying, reliable jobs by the standards of the area and they didn't want to cause bad feelings with the community. The drugs didn't effect me personally though, and while I guess I might have technically been well below the poverty line at some points while growing up we were part of an extended family and pretty self-sufficient so I think I was actually pretty rich.

Overall I thought it was great at the time, and still think it's great, but I'm probably kind of weird.

I moved to the "big city" (a town of about 40,000). It was okay, but I really didn't care for it that much. Maybe I'd like an actual big city better, but I don't think so. I don't like having so many people in my personal space (my personal space being everything within sight and earshot of me ).

I moved back to my hometown after about ten years. I live closer in now (although I still don't have running water, but that's because I'm living in an old barn for the summer). It takes me about half an hour to drive to work at the next town over. They have about a thousand people and a small grocery store, so I can get groceries on my way home from work. It takes about 1.5 hours to drive to the nearest gaming store, which is a bit of a bummer. My brother is into 40k though, so that's pretty convenient. Funny thin is that when I lived in town I didn't have a car, so it took me longer to get to work, the grocery store and the local gaming store. I did live in a house full of gamers for several years, which was really convenient. Also, when I stopped walking ~2 hours a day I gained about 30 lbs.

One downside to living in a small town is that it's hard to be choosy about friends. You have to mostly try to get along with people. It might be hard to make new friends too, but seeing as I grew up here and have lots of family in the area I didn't have that problem. I don't think entertainment is a problem, but then again I mostly like doing things that don't require other people. The Internet has made entertainment in rural places a lot easier. (One weird thing I've noticed though is that contrary to stereotypes people around here seemed pretty well read when I was growing up. In the winter in rural Alaska people used to spend a lot of time reading. Social activities used to often be putting on plays, poetry slams, books clubs and the like because they were actually some of the easiest things to do indoors. Satellite TV and better Internet access, while overall a good thing, has seemingly cut down on those kinds of activities.) I guess it depends on what you like doing. I love picking strawberries and walking the chickens when I get home. I enjoy doing town things every once in a while. If you'd rather do town things on weekdays and rural things on the weekends then it would be better to live in town.

Employment can definitely be troublesome. A lot of people work from home, work seasonally, or work in another town (or just plain don't work for reasons both good and bad).

Dakka Flakka Flame, that was one hell of a fascinating post. I can actually completely relate to some of your experiences from when I was a kid too, although it wasn't necessarily because I was living as remote as you. But I did live in foreign countries that didn't have all of the luxuries the developed world had, so it meant you had to fall back on more basic things and people than you normally would in a big city.

I've been told I would love Alaska, I have never been. I am going to highjack my own thread here and ask this tho: Is it true a lot of people go missing up there? I heard there will be boards in some of the towns/cities with pictures of people who have disappeared. Not all from crime related events but just because of how remote some of the area is, someone has a problem and can't get out of it, and no one knows what happened to them. Is that something everyone is aware of up there?

I don't think there is even anywhere in the UK that would count as remote by the standards of some of the posts so far.

Personally can't stand where I live.

A single room of 15'×11' that costs me £600 a month and no working heating.
Neighbours that shout and drink and play loud music till 1am.
No decent local stores unless you're willing to walk 2 hours...and carry it back...so you live off baked beansand toast.
No local hobby stores except a very meh hobby craft...in fact no stores of interest at all...
No family...no friends...
Only £40 a month for myself...

God I FETHING despise this dump

Crispy78 wrote:
I don't think there is even anywhere in the UK that would count as remote by the standards of some of the posts so far.

What about the Outer Hebrides? That is pretty remote.

My town is no longer remote! A FLGS just opened!

I used to live ten miles inland of Aberystwyth, itself only a town of barely 20,000. Nearest neighbours were 200 yards away.

I got on fine, it was peaceful and cosy. But if you’re not used to a very quiet environment with limited facilities before moving, it could prove a difficult change. You won’t have all the nice city things like cinemas and theatres, many shops or variety of shopping, museums or other amusements are few, special events etc don’t happen. The social life is different, it’s entirely possible to go days without seeing anyone unless you actually go into town, you often see the same people around, friendship groups tend to be smaller and closer knit. You also don’t have access to emergency anything because shops are some distance away, so popping out for the milk you forgot earlier is a pain in the ass, and if it’s late at night it becomes impossible. Public transport is hopeless and car ownership vital.

There are lots of lovely things about living in tomorrow places but city folk who aren’t used to it seem to really struggle. It’s seems romantic at first, but the boredom and inconvenience of things that were so simple before drives hem up the wall.

Crispy78 wrote:
I don't think there is even anywhere in the UK that would count as remote by the standards of some of the posts so far.

Lots of rural Scotland and Wales would be remote. Tarbert in the Isle of Harris has a population of 200, and it's over an hour's drive to Stornoway, with 2,000 population, and an hour or so by ferry to the mainland.

But southern England...

I live in Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, which is a very rural county.

However I can get to London in an hour by train or car. Reading, a town of 250,000 people, is 20 minutes drive away. I can drive to Oxford in 30 minutes.

You can hardly call it isolated.