Country Livin'
My wife and I recently moved. Not to a new town, that would be silly. No we moved (for the forth or fifth time since we've been together) from Gridley to Gridley. But this time we moved back out to the country. We tried our hands at living in town and came to the conclusion that we despised every second of it. It's noisy, there is little privacy, its dirty, and it just doesn't hold the kinds of charm that we were looking for. So now we live in "Gridley Rural", in other words the sticks. We are still renting, which is fine, but we live on a couple of acres of walnuts surrounded by hundreds of acres of prunes. Sure, we have neighbors, the closest ones are about 400 yards away and there are countless trees separating our houses. At night we can see the stars when we look up. Not just the bright ones either, all of them. Rarely do we hear a car drive by and when we do its off in the distance and I'm sure once the trees leaf out we'll notice them even less.
Sure there are a few draw backs. Now a trip into town for that forgotten loaf of bread or gallon of milk takes about half an hour round trip. I'm commuting further to work, not by much but its longer than the 11 blocks I was driving before. Also, there is no internet access out there short of dial-up. No DSL, no Cable. Believe me, we tried. So we got one of those wireless broadband cards from Verizon, it does the job okay. Hell, its faster than dial-up but not close to as fast as DSL, about four times more expensive too.
All in all its trade off. But everything is. You can't have everything after all and all things considered I feel like we came out better in the end. I'd have traded all of it just for the stars.