When travelling, my favorite parts of the trips are wandering through unassuming small towns. In general, I rarely spark up a conversation with strangers, but I often find myself getting chatty while in small towns. There is an additional friendliness to the situations, and an acknowledgement that you are clearly the outsider, so it is better to be a bit more vocal.
Over the past year, like everybody else, I have been contemplating my living situation. I think the issue is especially acute for me as an expat with no real ties to the place where I live, and it has me thinking of a person I met while on bike tour in Lincoln City who had lived in big cities and foreign countries, then decided to settle down and live a simpler life with a recently constructed greenhouse in Lincoln City. It left an impression on me, as I was about to move abroad, and have not lived back in the country since.
As the world has shut down, and the thrills of living in a foreign country have been muted, I have started to really contemplate the joys of moving to a smaller town and really settling in to be a part of the place beyond a mere worker and patron. I suppose my concerns are whether or not I would actually fit in and whether I would find decent employment. I might be able to find it back in Seattle, but more likely I will end up in a small town where things are cheap and simple.