That time I was on a thirty hour delayed Amtrak train we were stopped in Glasgow MT for about 18-20 hours. Home of the scotties!! The town has one stoplight, a pool hall and s McDonald's.
I live on MT and I’m pretty sure I have never stopped or stayed in Glasgow. It really is the middle of nowhere. But I love that you know they are the Scotties. Like the dog or Scottish people?
I think it was the dog. There was a sign in town that said it - actually it may have been painted on a wall. I took this one photo there.
I live on MT and I’m pretty sure I have never stopped or stayed in Glasgow. It really is the middle of nowhere. But I love that you know they are the Scotties. Like the dog or Scottish people?
I think it was the dog. There was a sign in town that said it - actually it may have been painted on a wall. I took this one photo there.
Whereas I get really confused by endless cities! Where is the open space???
I interned for a NJ community paper in 2004, and one of my assignments was to ride one of those tourist helicopters over Manhattan. The aerial view of seeing Central Park just plunked down in the middle of all those skyscrapers was nuts:
Post by shortcake2675 on Feb 21, 2018 5:12:42 GMT -5
I don’t gauge my remoteness by distance to a major city. It’s always been distance to a real grocery store and distance to Walmart, hospital, then distance to an international airport and major hospital. I’m in a pretty good spot now. 45 miles east of Battle Mountain on that first map, I live 2 miles from several grocery stores and Walmart, 4 miles from a hospital, and 3.5 hrs easy drive from an international airport and a major hospital. But our tendency to live in the middle of nowhere has made us road trip people and I don’t really use airports very often. And we have a regional airport.
It could be worse. North central Washington had more people scattered through the valley, but the three hours to Spokane was awful, 8 hrs to Seattle was worse, 45 min in labor to the hospital and it was 45 min to Walmart. It always felt more in the middle of nowhere than I do now smack dab in the middle of SLC, Boise and Reno, 8 hrs north of Vegas.
When I drive through really rural areas I feel probably what Thomas Jefferson felt - the beautiful simplicity of the yeoman farmer! The minimalist life-style! A slow-paced type of life where you make things with your own two hands! Zero distractions! If you have to drive an hour to get to a grocery store, then you have to plan really well. You have to make dinner from scratch every night - there's no pizza place you can pick something up from, let alone get Grubhub or even Blue Apron. I would clearly not be going out to breweries or coffee shops. It seems like a great way to save money and be efficient.
But then I realize how often I discover I don't have an ingredient for what I wanted to make for dinner, or the salad is started to wilt and I say, "screw it" and have to go grab something else.
My parents now live in a "rural" area, but their closest city (15 minutes away) has 40,000 people, the next closest city (and hour away) has 100,000 people. So they don't have everything, but they can stop at Dunkin Donuts on the way to work. That was the biggest surprise when I moved to CA - the vast stretched of wilderness, emphasis on the "wild."
That time I was on a thirty hour delayed Amtrak train we were stopped in Glasgow MT for about 18-20 hours. Home of the scotties!! The town has one stoplight, a pool hall and s McDonald's.
I bet the ice cream machine NEVER works at that McDonald's. Because they can't get them to work when there's one every .2 miles and therefore plenty of McD's competition.
Yeah, it’s not like that anymore. I wouldn’t exactly call it dense, but it’s rapidly filling in out there.
Which is dumb, because part of the reason why they moved it out there was to reduce the risk of an airline crash in densely populated areas, and to have room to grow.
And cuz of the Illuminati, obs.
The first time I flew into Denver I had no idea how vast it was. I stayed out in Cherry Creek, and I for sure thought that the cab driver was fucking with me, because we just kept going. But I am also the dummy who was on the phone with my husband while on a bus driving past Lake Michigan who kept saying how I couldn't believe how huge it was, and how I'd never seen a lake you couldn't see the other side of, so I am clearly not a geography whiz. (He's never let me live that down, btw. And he shouldn't.)
When I moved from New England to Phoenix i drove cross country. I think it was in Texas or NM when I was minutes from running out of gas because I had no concept of vast distances without people in them.
I figured there would gas stations at least every 20ish miles at the absolute MOST.
Lol. I learned the hard way to pay attention to signs that read “Next services: 200 miles.”
When I drive through really rural areas I feel probably what Thomas Jefferson felt - the beautiful simplicity of the yeoman farmer! The minimalist life-style! A slow-paced type of life where you make things with your own two hands! Zero distractions! If you have to drive an hour to get to a grocery store, then you have to plan really well. You have to make dinner from scratch every night - there's no pizza place you can pick something up from, let alone get Grubhub or even Blue Apron. I would clearly not be going out to breweries or coffee shops. It seems like a great way to save money and be efficient.
But then I realize how often I discover I don't have an ingredient for what I wanted to make for dinner, or the salad is started to wilt and I say, "screw it" and have to go grab something else.
My parents now live in a "rural" area, but their closest city (15 minutes away) has 40,000 people, the next closest city (and hour away) has 100,000 people. So they don't have everything, but they can stop at Dunkin Donuts on the way to work. That was the biggest surprise when I moved to CA - the vast stretched of wilderness, emphasis on the "wild."