The Ultimate Small Town, Part 1

"Did I hear you talking about Colorado? Are you going there?"

"Yep. Well, we're going there for New Year's, but we're trying to move there, too."

"I just moved back. I lived there for four years. Where in Colorado do you want to move?"

"Crested Butte."

"Crested Butte or Gunnison?"

"Crested Butte."

"Why would you want to move to Crested Butte?"

"Why, where did you live in Colorado?"

"Denver."

"Oh."

The above is a reasonable facsimile of a conversation my husband had in a bar this week. Though it may seem from this blog that we've moved on, we still want to move to Crested Butte, just as soon as we can figure out how to make it happen. And we still talk about it all the time, particularly to strangers who aren't sick of hearing about it already.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that the time I spent in Denver was entirely in the airport, but I wasn't impressed by what I saw when we were landing. I'm sure that Denver probably has lots to offer, but I'm positive it's not anywhere I want to live. I'll also admit I didn't know this guy at all or anything about his background, but I suspect that he thinks Crested Butte is entirely too small (much the same way I think Denver is entirely too big).

If anyone had told me when I was in high school that I would someday want to live in a small town with a population of about 1,500, I would have thought they were nuts. In fact, until I went away to college and met people from actual small towns, I thought I did live in a small town, even though the population was about 40,000. It seemed that there was nothing there. If we want to do much shopping, go to a concert or go to a chain restaurant that wasn't fast food (think Chi Chi's), we had to go to Lansing or Ann Arbor. I couldn't wait to leave and I couldn't imagine wanting to live anywhere smaller. Many of the people I grew up with felt the same way, and most of them did move away the first chance they got.

But that was before things like the Internet, satellite t.v., BlackBerry and e-mail were a part of my everyday life. And slowly I began to think that living in a small town, and getting away from the traffic (yes, I am complaining about traffic in Lansing—it's relative, get over it), the endless construction and the general bullshit that comes from living in a place where there are a lot of other people, wasn't such a bad idea after all. 

I started to realize this more after we bought our cabin. It was always hard to leave and come back to the city after we spent the weekend up there. The pace was so much nicer, there were fewer people on the roads, you could run into the hardware store and get something on a Saturday morning without fighting crowds of people. In short, it was peaceful.

Still, there was something missing there, and although it many ways, it would be a good place to move, it certainly wasn't the perfect place. 

To be continued ...