where do you want to live?

While I am proud that we are a military family, one of the big downsides is the fact that we don't get to pick where we live. Navy hospitals are always in big cities surrounded by endless suburbs, be it Portsmouth, VA, Washington, DC, or Naples, Italy. So the whole family is looking forward to the big retirement day when we can unpack our things for the very last time and sit on our front porch and see just trees, fields, and sky. To get an idea of the scale, that little dark blob in the middle of the field is a large JD tractor, we can only see 1 house from anywhere on our farm.

Apparently many of my fellow Americans feel the same way:

...Pew Research Center survey out today on where Americans would most like to live. Whether they favor cities, suburbs or the countryside, almost half wish they lived somewhere else, the report found. City dwellers are more likely to dream of living somewhere else, and men in rural areas are far happier living there than women.

• 46% would prefer to live in a different type of community from the one they now reside. Adults 50 to 64 who live in cities are the least likely to say they live in the ideal place; two-thirds of those in that age group who live in the country say they couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

When Joe Higginbotham goes to town, he never runs into traffic jams. He never has to circle to find a parking spot. And he never has to worry about safety. "I can park my car in the street, get out, leave the keys in the ignition," says Higginbotham, 57, a retired instrument engineer for a large paper company. He runs errands at the bank, store and post office and makes a stop at the local saloon and "nobody bothers anything. … I love it here." What Higginbotham calls "his little piece of heaven" is Palisade, Colo., 15 miles east of Grand Junction. Population: 2,793. Traffic light: one. USAToday

When I head up to the nearest grocery store from our farm I might see 3 cars during the 10 mile trip. When I went to the Commissary yesterday afternoon it took me 3 cycles of the stoplight to simply cross Georgia Ave.