A Long Way to Town

We live forty miles from town and sixteen of those miles are on a dirt road. A round trip plus all the scurrying around doing errands often adds up to 100 miles of driving by the time I get back home. Because of this we try to limit our trips to town as much as we can. I have a big truck which I need for my work as a metal sculptor. Big trucks get poor gas mileage. Mine gets about 17 mpg which makes a trip to town cost about $20 for gas (at $3.50/gallon). If I had a regular five-day-a-week job in town it would cost me over $500 each month just for the gasoline. Fortunately I don’t have to go to town every day. I try to keep it down to twice a week.

Because of the dirt road I go through tires faster than city people and my truck’s front end needs alignment more often.  I am sure there is other accelerated wear and tear on my truck that can be attributed to living out in the wild.

Living on a long dirt road also limits what kind of vehicle you can have. We would love to have a little car that gets 40 mpg but there would be so many times when it would not be big enough to carry all the stuff we need to transport and there would be times when the dirt road would be too muddy to drive a little car. We can’t afford to have a different car for every purpose. We have to compromise and pick the most useful vehicles for our circumstances. For us that means a full-size pickup and a minivan.

Then there is the time.  It is two hours round trip for a drive to town. When we lived in town we could easily go out several times a day for various things. That is just not practical where we live now. My wife and I make lists of the errands that need to be done on each trip to town. We have counted the errands and some days we have had more than fifteen stops. The bank, the post office, library, dumping trash (no trash pickup out here in the woods!), groceries, and gasoline are almost always on the list. I often need to buy steel and welding supplies for my work and meet with clients in town. We try to schedule multiple meetings on the same day or, when there is an unavoidable appointment, we make that the day for our town errands. We try to cram as much as we can into a day in town. I keep a little notebook with me to keep track of the errands and shopping lists.

I have become quite a connoisseur of public restrooms as a result of living so far out. By the time I get to town I have to go! I have my favorite spots - the hardware store has a big, clean bathroom that is rarely occupied and so does the supermarket. We don't miss the opportunity to go if we are at a restaurant either. Out here in the woods I just pee on the ground but they frown on that in town.

The weather can make our road pretty nasty. I have nearly gotten stuck sliding around on our muddy road. The truck gets covered in mud, too. It is important to clean it as well as I can when that happens. The mud covers the undercarriage with a crust that can cause problems. There is a sensor on the tail of my truck’s transmission that got so covered in mud that it failed. I had to chip off the hardened mud to find it. It turned out that it was full of mud and all I had to do is clean it. Still, that’s an extra thing to pay attention to if you live on a muddy road.

The distance to town limits our social activities. There are often events, social gatherings, etc. going on that would be fun to attend but, if they are not on one of our already scheduled days to go to town, we just don’t do it. In the winter our trips to town have to end early enough in the evening for us to get home with enough time to fire up the wood stove and get the house warm before we go to bed.

 

Since I only go to town twice a week and my wife tries to only go once a week, the trip becomes kind of special. Out here we can wear our worst clothes. Nobody sees us so who cares? When we go to town we make sure we are clean and wear nice clothes. “Put on your best, Honey! We’re goin’ to town!”

Living remote is great, don’t get me wrong, but there are downsides and if you are considering living in a remote location, it is good to have some idea what they might be. A long drive to town has its problems. An upside is that most of the time it's a beautiful drive.