[jcp123]

My parents had a Country estate for a while - 8 miles from town. It was calm there, very freeing. We even had our own gun range in the back yard. It was fantastic, but a lot of upkeep work, and they downsized being on a retirement income. Another downside was internet - we found a solution for a while with what was essentially long-range wifi. It was a neat solution from a kind gentleman who ran a family business outfitting locals who weren't served by existing high-speed internet, but the company folded shortly after a terrible accident which killed the owner as he was disassembling a tower he'd purchased and wanted to move to widen his coverage area.

Echoing a bit of what the kind sailor said above, as a truck driver you're always somewhere but kind of on an island restricted to where you can walk to in a reasonable amount of time. This is a lonely job, and though there's lots of interesting scenery, it's not the kind of travel which lets you experience new places in the ways which make real travel exciting. Instead, I can tell you where the roads are good and bad, how aggressive drivers are, and what areas have a lot of traffic enforcement.

In a sense, the city in which I now reside is still sort of in the middle of nowhere. At a population of just over 100k, it's not isolated. It technically has all of the city things. But it lacks a depth of culture, entertainment, and free-spiritedness. It's big enough to be big, and small enough to be small.