At work I had someone accuse me of being a "city kid." While I find myself to be more of a city type, I was definitely not raised in one. Yeah, it could have been worse--18,000 is kind of crappy but not TOTALLY crappy--but it still stands that we had to drive FOR-EV-ER to get anywhere.
For someone who gets motion sickness, that's the worst part.
Well, also the fact that my parents liked to not tell us where we were going. So we'd get in the car thinking we would be going just down the road and then we'd go on an hour-long drive to God Knows Where ...
I digress.
The point is that I lived in the middle of nowhere. Forty-five minutes in a car would get you to the nearest Real Mall, but the best shopping, movies, etc. necessitated a two-hour drive. Taking an airplane anywhere meant 2.5-3 hours in a car, plus however long you had to spend in the plane. Flying to Japan was essentially a 24-hour ordeal between driving to the airport and getting all the connecting flights. Airports out here are good at getting you to Chicago or Dallas, but not much of anywhere else.
I had a friend try to tell me, "I feel your pain. My town only has 4000 people." That "town" was a suburb of Chicago.
Someone else tried to play that game with me. He lived a half hour out of Dallas. If your hometown can be considered part of a "metro area" that involves a million people or more, you do not get to say you live in the middle of nowhere.
Otherwise, here's a pretty good gauge:
Start at the center of town. Drive (the speed limit, please) in one direction for fifteen minutes. Are you still somewhere? Then you live somewhere.
Drive in one direction for fifteen minutes. Are you nowhere? Congratulations! You live nowhere!
Right now I do live in one of those metro areas. It's nice, though I wish I lived a little closer to the city. Living in a place like this is nice, but after spending most of my life with the inconvenience of sitting in the car for hours and hours, I like to know that Somewhere is always at my fingertips.
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