When it comes to going places, I think living in a small state helps quite a bit with the "necessity" of fast travel, because it messes with your conception of travel time in a way that doesn't happen with big states. We in RI always say that we have different ideas about how time works than others. Going from Johnston to Warwick (10-20 minutes each way) to shop at the mall? That's a day trip--very exhausting. And don't even ask about going to Portsmouth or Newport! That will take you almost an hour, which means you should probably pack a night bag...
We get a lot of funny looks from out-of-staters. Especially if we ever ask for coffee milk.
We heard those jokes about the trip from Providence to Westerly requiring the packing of an overnight bag when we lived in RI, haha. But as homeschoolers, we traversed the state regularly for event after event after event .. and sometimes day trips to far-away Mystic, CT or Sturbridge, MA! We were pioneers, after all, and just headed 'em up and moved 'em out!
Sounds like where I live. Until recently, my husband and I could get to the most distant place we needed to get in 20 minutes flat, and that's if there was lots of traffic. When the kids were growing up, skating/hockey rink, crew practice, swim practice etc. were all within anywhere between 5 to 15 minutes away from home. My siblings left, moving to the big city, Pittsburgh. UGH! Every place they have to get to seems to take 45 minutes, minimum. No thank you! Small states, small towns, I prefer them:)
When we lived in San Francisco, you had to be a daring road warrior just to get through town. And that was before the 1989 earthquake which leveled a freeway. So we moved to a idyllic 5 acre place in Oregon but then had to drive minimum 15 minutes plus to get anywhere. We now live in that nearby city of 35,000 and can walk to any needed destination (food, medical, or even entertainment). That is ideal.
RI is a small state with a very dense population, the most-densely populated state in the union. We used to say that from our home in about the dead center of the state, it took us 25 minutes to drive to visit our friends IN THE SAME TOWN, and that was one of the rural ones! When I moved to NH it was to get away from the population density and the traffic everywhere. However, it's not like the old days. We HAD a pharmacy when we moved here. Now we have to go to Concord for that. We HAVE two doctors in town, but the are booked solid and mostly refer patients to specialists in Concord (state capital) or Dartmouth, to mega-medical enclaves. Almost every doctor in this state is a member of a HUGE medical group, with shared files and shared waits for appointments and there's nothing at all easy about having a doctor in town anymore. We have a grocery store a mile away -- that's good -- and a very lightly supplied organic market in town where you can go in a pinch for eggs (over $5 per dozen, small). We still do have farms and some roadside stands, which is good. And we have a bank. But it's a drive everywhere for anything else. In old days, the small towns had small businesses, too.. Not so much now. If they DO they have businesses and services they become small over-crowded towns, and fast.
Understand. But it makes you wonder how our country survived pre-automobile. By the way, Dr. Robert Malone has a great essay out about Homesteading, how it is in our country’s DNA. So true but many of us missed that gene pool!
When I was a kid, I grew up in a small town that wasn't tiny, so we had a lot -- but still, walking to services was for the few who lived right near the main street. BUT back then all of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side of the family grew gardens. They had learned that skill growing up in the depression, in desperate poverty. My father's family were not gardeners, but my grandfather grew his own meat, and my father was used to doing that. They owned enough property for it. And buying from farms was certainly a way of life then. My mother's father always raised chickens and geese, which he could do even though they never owned their own property, so they had eggs. But my mother was the 9th in a family of 13 children, and just getting food was a constant challenge for her family. One of her sisters married a dairy farmer, and HER gardens were legendary in our family. The kids drank raw milk, and of course they raised chickens and meat for the table. When my uncle "retired," he bought a smaller farm (only 90 acres, as he said) and raised pigs. They worked very hard, and all of my cousins and I got the benefit of growing up with that farm as a regular part of our lives. All of my aunts put up canned goods from their gardens, enough to last the winter. They all knew how to cook from scratch and for a crowd. In old days, people bought supplies in bulk, of course, and the cuisine was somewhat limited, because if you couldn't grow it or raise it, you often didn't have it at all. It's certainly true that through my parents' generation people knew how to live off the land, even if the land was only a "liberty garden." Remember when Pa Ingalls went all the way to Independence for supplies? Horses and wagons were necessary, but you had to grow and provide food for them, too. We have it easy in such ways. But it was not just cars that put the farming way of life out of business. It was politics, regulations, litigation, and punitive tax burdens on land-owners. Oh, and inheritance taxes, which made it impossible for heirs to keep the family land.
Sounds like you need a local farmer’s/growers market. This is the one thing Oregon has done well. You need only go to one place a week for all your produce and even meat and crafts. You can talk directly to the farmers and support then with CSA type programs before growing season. The other follow-on benefit is that this actually helps local economy. The families that come to shop this market are huge. It has grown businesses that know they can sell there. And it has grown restaurants in our downtown catering to the fresh and local palate. A Win-Win all around.
That would work in summers here, but not for most of the year. We have a very short growing season . There is a very small farmers' market weekly in our town, but it doesn't work for our general grocery needs. Kind of haphazard as to who sells and what they have. The population here doesn't support such things on any large scale. Where we lived in RI was a town of 30K .. and other than a couple of restaurants and a convenience store, there was nothing within walking distance! The town was very spread out and a car was necessary to get to just about anything.
When it comes to going places, I think living in a small state helps quite a bit with the "necessity" of fast travel, because it messes with your conception of travel time in a way that doesn't happen with big states. We in RI always say that we have different ideas about how time works than others. Going from Johnston to Warwick (10-20 minutes each way) to shop at the mall? That's a day trip--very exhausting. And don't even ask about going to Portsmouth or Newport! That will take you almost an hour, which means you should probably pack a night bag...
We get a lot of funny looks from out-of-staters. Especially if we ever ask for coffee milk.
We heard those jokes about the trip from Providence to Westerly requiring the packing of an overnight bag when we lived in RI, haha. But as homeschoolers, we traversed the state regularly for event after event after event .. and sometimes day trips to far-away Mystic, CT or Sturbridge, MA! We were pioneers, after all, and just headed 'em up and moved 'em out!
Sounds like where I live. Until recently, my husband and I could get to the most distant place we needed to get in 20 minutes flat, and that's if there was lots of traffic. When the kids were growing up, skating/hockey rink, crew practice, swim practice etc. were all within anywhere between 5 to 15 minutes away from home. My siblings left, moving to the big city, Pittsburgh. UGH! Every place they have to get to seems to take 45 minutes, minimum. No thank you! Small states, small towns, I prefer them:)
When we lived in San Francisco, you had to be a daring road warrior just to get through town. And that was before the 1989 earthquake which leveled a freeway. So we moved to a idyllic 5 acre place in Oregon but then had to drive minimum 15 minutes plus to get anywhere. We now live in that nearby city of 35,000 and can walk to any needed destination (food, medical, or even entertainment). That is ideal.
RI is a small state with a very dense population, the most-densely populated state in the union. We used to say that from our home in about the dead center of the state, it took us 25 minutes to drive to visit our friends IN THE SAME TOWN, and that was one of the rural ones! When I moved to NH it was to get away from the population density and the traffic everywhere. However, it's not like the old days. We HAD a pharmacy when we moved here. Now we have to go to Concord for that. We HAVE two doctors in town, but the are booked solid and mostly refer patients to specialists in Concord (state capital) or Dartmouth, to mega-medical enclaves. Almost every doctor in this state is a member of a HUGE medical group, with shared files and shared waits for appointments and there's nothing at all easy about having a doctor in town anymore. We have a grocery store a mile away -- that's good -- and a very lightly supplied organic market in town where you can go in a pinch for eggs (over $5 per dozen, small). We still do have farms and some roadside stands, which is good. And we have a bank. But it's a drive everywhere for anything else. In old days, the small towns had small businesses, too.. Not so much now. If they DO they have businesses and services they become small over-crowded towns, and fast.
Understand. But it makes you wonder how our country survived pre-automobile. By the way, Dr. Robert Malone has a great essay out about Homesteading, how it is in our country’s DNA. So true but many of us missed that gene pool!
When I was a kid, I grew up in a small town that wasn't tiny, so we had a lot -- but still, walking to services was for the few who lived right near the main street. BUT back then all of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side of the family grew gardens. They had learned that skill growing up in the depression, in desperate poverty. My father's family were not gardeners, but my grandfather grew his own meat, and my father was used to doing that. They owned enough property for it. And buying from farms was certainly a way of life then. My mother's father always raised chickens and geese, which he could do even though they never owned their own property, so they had eggs. But my mother was the 9th in a family of 13 children, and just getting food was a constant challenge for her family. One of her sisters married a dairy farmer, and HER gardens were legendary in our family. The kids drank raw milk, and of course they raised chickens and meat for the table. When my uncle "retired," he bought a smaller farm (only 90 acres, as he said) and raised pigs. They worked very hard, and all of my cousins and I got the benefit of growing up with that farm as a regular part of our lives. All of my aunts put up canned goods from their gardens, enough to last the winter. They all knew how to cook from scratch and for a crowd. In old days, people bought supplies in bulk, of course, and the cuisine was somewhat limited, because if you couldn't grow it or raise it, you often didn't have it at all. It's certainly true that through my parents' generation people knew how to live off the land, even if the land was only a "liberty garden." Remember when Pa Ingalls went all the way to Independence for supplies? Horses and wagons were necessary, but you had to grow and provide food for them, too. We have it easy in such ways. But it was not just cars that put the farming way of life out of business. It was politics, regulations, litigation, and punitive tax burdens on land-owners. Oh, and inheritance taxes, which made it impossible for heirs to keep the family land.
Sounds like you need a local farmer’s/growers market. This is the one thing Oregon has done well. You need only go to one place a week for all your produce and even meat and crafts. You can talk directly to the farmers and support then with CSA type programs before growing season. The other follow-on benefit is that this actually helps local economy. The families that come to shop this market are huge. It has grown businesses that know they can sell there. And it has grown restaurants in our downtown catering to the fresh and local palate. A Win-Win all around.
That would work in summers here, but not for most of the year. We have a very short growing season . There is a very small farmers' market weekly in our town, but it doesn't work for our general grocery needs. Kind of haphazard as to who sells and what they have. The population here doesn't support such things on any large scale. Where we lived in RI was a town of 30K .. and other than a couple of restaurants and a convenience store, there was nothing within walking distance! The town was very spread out and a car was necessary to get to just about anything.