On 18/07/2011 2:30 PM, Ranée at Arabian Knits wrote:

>> Me too. The town that we lived in when I was a kid was about 15 miles
>> outside of Toronto. There were shopping plazas within a few miles and we
>> could be downtown in 15-20 minutes. When I was a teen we moved to a
>> small city in Niagara but were in the very edge if it. Across the street
>> I had fields and forests to roam. A few years after we got married we
>> moved to this town. It is 3 miles into town, and there are three small
>> cities within a 20 minute drive.
>
> We loved our small town where we used to live, but part of that was
> that it was so close to larger cities. We had the convenience,
> availability and cultural opportunities, without the crime, traffic,
> hassle, etc. Because Rich worked in our town, we never even had to be
> on the road during the commute times. We thought living in a small town
> would prepare us for this town, but this small town _is_ the big town in
> the area. That is hard.


I had an interesting conversation with one of my wife's old classmates
at a reunion of some type years ago. She asked my wife if she didn't
miss all the benefits of the city, the shopping, museums, restaurants,
galleries etc. I carefully quizzed her about how often she did no
those things. We used to drive into the city almost every weekend. We
would visit my wife's parents, park our car there and travel around the
city by subway. We would go downtown and go our separate ways and then
meet up at the museum or art gallery or some other interesting place.
Then we could head down to the market and pick up something interesting
for dinner and head home.

We had an out of town membership to the museum, which was cheap and gave
us free admission. We had a membership at the local art gallery and that
gave us free admission to the art gallery in the city. We saw several
plays there every year and we ate a lot of lunches and dinners in the
downtown restaurants.

It took that woman about 45 minutes to drive downtown from her house in
the burbs. We could be downtown in an hour and a quarter. As it turned
out, we were downtown in her city a lot more often than she was, saw
more theatre than she did and saw a lot more of the art gallery and museum.