T.T.: Remote Living, Part 1

Some time ago, a reader named Lauren mentioned in the comments that she always has so many questions about what it's like to live in "such a rural area."

This made me think that I should clarify the distinction between "rural" and "remote." 

A "rural" area is anyplace that isn't urban or suburban. You can live in a rural place--like Blackrock--that's only a twenty-minute drive from a city. Or even closer. Rural is a place you can have chickens and some land around you, but you're not in a city. But rural areas are not generally what I would consider especially incovenient. They may require a bit of driving, but they are a reasonable distance to an urban center.

"Remote," on the other hand, is inconvenient. At least, in our modern understanding. Where I live now would definitely be considered remote by most people's standards. It's 100 miles to even a small city, and that small city might not even have something like a Walmart.

To get to Walmart from our house involves a lot of miles of this.

There are people who live more remotely than we do--say, the Alaskan bush--but not many.

Anyway.

I think it's really common for people to have a LOT of questions about what it's like to live remotely, so I'm going to do a series of Tuesday Tips post about that. Starting today with Lauren's questions.

How do you get your groceries home intact? Do you have to take a cooler any time you do a grocery run?

Short answers: In the back of the car with all the animal feed, and yes. Usually two coolers. 

Longer answer: Luckily for Lauren, I did a whole post about this once, and here it is! Since I wrote that a couple of years ago, the very small store sadly closed, so now it's just the micro store where we can usually get milk and eggs, and then a lot of open road between us and the nearest bananas. 

Are there different/special supplies you keep on-hand is case of (God forbid) a medical emergency?

No. I'm pretty careful about keeping any over-the-counter stuff we may need in stock--children's Tylenol, bandages, etc.--since I can't just run out to a store to get some. But I don't keep, like, a tourniquet or something on hand. We have volunteer fire departments in both villages that are ten miles away from us, plus there's an ambulance company about 25 miles away that responds to emergencies. And, in more serious emergencies, our county has a contract with a medical helicopter company for transport to a hospital. So if anything really bad were to happen, I would call 911 and one of those agencies would respond.

You can still get Amazon deliveries . . . right?

Right. The UPS driver is a local celebrity because he is our provider of All Things Ordered Online. Anything you can get online, I can, too. Maybe not with the two-day shipping guaranteed, but it will get here eventually. This is, honestly, probably the biggest game-changer for remote living ever. Well, that and the Internet access itself. I order a lot of things online that I have in the past purchased at stores--clothing, canned tuna, paper and ink for A.'s office printer--and I feel very lucky that I can. 

There! Those were Lauren's questions. If there are any more specific questions you have, go ahead and leave them in the comments and I'll answer them next week. Otherwise, I'll do a more generalized overview of the things I think are helpful for living where I live.