One small town (to the north) of my house with expensive but awesomely awesome upscale grocery store plus other stores I can’t afford, but with the best thrift store on the planet-- three miles. Same town has an oddly good library, probably because some rich people gave them enormous grants. Not a typical small town. Lots of money. I wouldn’t eat sushi in any other small Idaho town, lemme tell you!
There are two other towns south of here, one about eight miles the other maybe fifteen. There’s a McDonalds in the closer one but no other chain fast food for 80 miles. I haven’t eaten fast food in about two years. Each has a bigger grocery store that is part of a three-store local chain. There’s an Albertsons as well in the closer town, but probably only because they are based out of Boise. I like the local stores better except for frozen stuff.
The closest big-box chain stores are 80 miles away. This saves me quite a bit of $$$, I suspect. Most of the furnishings and kitchen stuff in my house are from that awesome thrift store. You would not believe what people with more money than sense will just give away! Bless their hearts.
Health care, not a serious problem. I’m a mile away from the very small local hospital. Every once in a while I hear them sending somebody off to Boise in a helicopter. Again, there’s a lot of money up here, so for anything besides very specialized medical care, the situation is pretty good.
If there wasn’t a lot of money up here it would be very different, except for the 80 miles to the chain stores thing. But that’s what ordering stuff on the internet is for.
It’s an issue for my parents. They live in the middle of nowhere, with a bar/restaurant and a laundrymat. Everything else is 25 miles away.
Earlier this summer, their home caught fire. It took 45 minutes for a fire department to get there. They lost everything except their cars, which were parked outside.
2 weeks later, my father had a heart attack. Thankfully, the local pastor and his wife are EMTs. They picked up my father, in their vehicle with some form of medical kit, and started driving towards town, until they met the ambulance.
So now my mother is, justifiably, nervous about rebuilding in the same area.
Only two businesses, and one’s a laundromat? A bar/restaurant I can understand. But a laundromat? Are washing machines in the home in short supply in their area? Or is cleanliness unusually highly valued?
When I lived in Tbilisi, our internet was spotty enough so as to be unusable and I once flew to Dubai to download a 300mb software update (1279 miles). I grew up about 45 miles from the nearest fast food and department store in rural Nevada.
Well, a laundromat doesn’t have to have a person at it. All you need is a room with water and electrical connections, a couple of washing machines and a couple of driers. Having been in said laundromat, I’m guessing the machines were bought second hand, so probably fairly cheap.
It’s an area with quite a few hunting camps/cabins, which often don’t have laundy rooms. So Friday night, you go to the bar for the fish fry. On the way in, you throw a couple of loads into washers, which are across the street from the bar.
I pretty much grew up in a small, rural town. We weren’t on a gas main until around the time I was born. Our town had:
[ul]a post office
[li]a gas station (just a garage now)[/li][li]a body shop[/li][li]a volunteer fire department[/li][li]a mom & pop general store (also gone, but there’s a convenience store up the street)[/li][li]a mom & pop diner (gone as well, there appears to be a newspaper in that building)[/li][li]a school that served Kindergarten through 8th (6th, 7th, and 8th are now bussed ~9 miles south to the same town that has the high school)a barber (closed while I still lived there, ended up going ~9 miles south)[/ul]Everything else was, and still is, in the three interconnected towns some 13 miles east.[/li]
If you’ve seen The Hunter, you’ve seen portions of where I grew up.