Nice stuff. I wonder where that rural home is.

I live in a rural area so...

Arcata, being our college town, is the most expensive town here. I would consider other nearby towns if being cheap is important. Try Blue Lake, where I am (I'm outside town), it's more rural but under 10 miles from Arcata.
We moved here 25 years ago....back then, a 1000 square ft house with an acre cost us $800a month. I've owned my home since then, so I'm out of the rent loop, but poking on craigslist looks like around $1500-$2000 for a decent house, with some more, some less depending on what you get. Nice 2-3 bedroom homes seem to be about $500000 now with some property.

Our gas is the most expensive in the country consistently, over $4.

Beyond that, it's pretty cheap. Property tax is 1%, food is reasonable, entertainment is mostly nature and community, fishing, hunting, hiking, boating, surfing, diving, even back country skiing 1/2 hour up hill, so free, although there are paid events too, we even had GWAR play a few times in Eureka, but no opera or ballet.

My wife and I live on $30k....we have 4 cars, pets, vacations, a large pond, hot tub, etc. Because I have room, I grow a lot of our produce and we have around 40 fruit trees. We aren't putting any extra in the bank, but aren't depleting our savings either.

We are the marijuana capital of America, if you know the right people, it's maybe $100 an oz for A grade, $10-20 a gram for wax/oil.

All in all, it depends on your lifestyle. It would be easy to spend all you save living here on gas, or easy to not have a car at all if you're in town and will ride a bike in the rain. While there are certainly cheaper places to live, I'm not sure there's better. Our forests are gorgeous with skyscraper redwoods, the ocean is cold but clean here, the rivers unspoilt and full of fish, our air is some of the cleanest in the lower 48, water is too, and our summer daytime temperature is mostly 70-75 F, winter is low 50's- freezing, but we have very few freezing days.

Mckinleyville, just above Arcata, was (still is?) the largest town in California with no police, only highway patrol. They got a multiplex before police!

We have a ton of immigration from the bay area, but more often than not they move back because they miss the fast pace and abundant services and entertainment....I didn't.

Hope that helps. We love it here, but we're slow paced and super cheap bastards. If you are too, come check it out.

*wtf *music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oui-Ofu-XHU for a musical compilation from https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/9psgu0/guy_sets_up_motion_activated_sprinklers_to_deter/e84mx79/.

They should pee in their own yards like I do with my own rural backyard.

It occurs to me this may be a highly regional food item. Cheese curds are really just chunks of (typically) mozzarella or cheddar cheese. Usually about the size of a regular or large marble. They can be bought fresh, or at restaurants you'll generally get them deep fried. That's what White Castle had a few months ago, and they were not quite MN State Fair quality (which are divine), but pretty damned good for the price.

If you want the best possible unfried cheese curds though, look to Wisconsin. In rural areas you can get them ridiculously fresh, and you'll know if you have - they squeak when you bite into them. That stops happening in less than a day, regardless of how they're kept.

Edit: Cheese curds are also a vital component of poutine, a Quebecois dish. French fries, cheese curds, crumbled bacon, and brown gravy. So goddamn bad for you / delicious.

Verizon because it can handle rural area here.

*kids *ftw

Lots of bunnies in my rural area too, but no fences.

Mostly the trouble depends on where you work and how publicly you make your statement. I'd mostly get called a racist, but working for a partially publicly funded place if I was vocal enough losing your job or being told to apologise and be quiet are real possibilities.

The not allowed to talk about it applies much more heavily to anyone in the media. A recent example would be an aboriginal man that was recently shot by a white farmer. The narrative on the national CBC media made a big deal about rampant racism in the region against aboriginals. In their coverage of local opinion it was even more one sided, as they described two sides, the grieving family of the deceased and their supporters, and then the racists who sided with the farmer because they hated aboriginal people. They very slowly, reluctantly and buried deep under a lot of disclaimers released more information on the case.

The young man that was killed was in a truck with 4 of his friends, and their story was that they got a flat tire and pulled into the yard to seek help with repairs. The CBC ran that much right away. They were much more reluctant to include that the RCMP had been called BEFORE the truck got onto that farm because they had been trying to steal a truck from a neighbouring farm already beforehand. It wasn't until during the trial that even more came out, and CBC again reluctantly included details from the friends that where with the victim. All the occupants of the vehicle had been drinking very heavily all afternoon. They admitted to 'checking cars' at the earlier neighbouring farm. They admitted to using the butt end of a rifle to try and break the windows of the truck at the neighbouring farm, but the stock broke off the gun. It was found at the neighbouring farm by police. Upon arriving at the final farm, they admitted trying to start up an ATV and going through and unlocked vehicle there as well, but disagreed on who was doing which. The trial even included text messages from the night before wondering if one of the friends would be able to "go on missions" tomorrow because they were hiding from police after a liquor store robbery. The farmer also mentioned being scared about what could happen the day of the shooting because he thought back to a story he'd been told about 2 farmers being killed on their yards a few years before he'd moved into the area. Only 1 media outlet in the country, and in 1 article checked out that the identity of one of those killers back then turned out to be the victims uncle. I had to go back looking for the original article from when those murders took place to be sure that the current news article wasn't just sensationalising things.

Now of course none of that means you want to see somebody getting killed over property theft. None of that means racism in any way shape or form is justified. However, when there was a rampant run of rural crime across the area and farmers were getting more and more fed up and nervous about their safety something bad was eventually going to happen. It's a tragedy, but our media was absolutely terrified of covering the full story because listing the facts I just laid out is considered racist. Your blaming the victim. My listing of the above facts is not supposed to be done without including many times more explanations and reasons that this was the white man's fault.

Ultimately, the absolute failure to talk openly about things in Canada is getting people killed. We absolutely need to be clear that stealing doesn't deserve a death penalty. We ALSO need to tell a group of young adults that were going farm to farm, with a loaded rifle, raging drunk, stealing and breaking into vehicles that doing that was a BAD idea and one of the reasons is that doing so might get you shot by someone that doesn't know if your going to hurt them or not. I really believe if the kids had been white that would have been the narrative, but because of race it wasn't. It just makes things worse and inspires more risky and dangerous decisions from people in the future and more people will continue to get hurt.

Owned? You raised them?

There are wild crows in my rural area. They are noisy. They fly a lot. I haven't seen them lately though. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeT6GWQ-nXQ for a video of them.

This Moore, OK EF5 flyover gives a good idea of what is left by the path once you get about 4 minutes into the video.

I know the Jarrell F5, which I was around 12 miles from at the time, left similar damage but it was harder to tell because it just hoovered up everything. It literally ripped the asphalt from the roadways and left them like old dirt roads. Because a lot of it was rural, entire trailer parks and farms just became empty fields.

Perhaps my emphasis on the words "no one" was a bit much but while riding I'm much less trusting of driver behaviour than when I'm in my car because the outcome of a collision will greatly favour the driver. So yes, obviously you have to trust people to an extent but you have to keep aware of careless inattention, maliciousness, etc.

I've ridden for about 8 years now (for fitness/competition) and have seen and experienced some crazy shit where I ride (primarily rural roads, some small towns, etc). I will never forget the time an older gentleman waved me down for directions while I was riding. I cut my interval short, turned around, and helped point him in the right direction. As I resumed my ride, he blew by me without leaving me much room, startling me as I had let my guard down trusting that this guy was going to pass me safely. I was shocked.

So yeah, I'm very wary of all drivers when riding.

I've had a pretty good response to my butchering of french in Montreal, The shop keeper caught on right away and let me struggle a bit then saved me by speaking english. I think rural areas are less forgiving.

Sam B is carefully stepping around a more important issue than geography here---income inequality. Rural areas are more likely to have a lower incomes, and be without proper coverage in a for-profit system.

Years ago I saw 'The Business of Being Born,' and found it pretty shocking how hospitals treated childbirth as an opportunity for profit. It is a well done doc, if you're curious.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995061

I watched this the other day, and honestly, I thought they were a little hyperbolic.

"Sometimes the nearest hospital is over an hours drive away!"

er, yeah.... the USA is a big country.

Even in NZ, a country over 30 times smaller, the nearest big hospital can easily be over an hour away from a small rural town.

It seems really unreasonable to expect that someone who lives up a windy mountain road should have an emergency obstetrics dept on their doorstep.