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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Re: I also realized that I may be the only real hick on this board
<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home DI grew up in a small mill town in Western MA, long after the mills closed. It was so broke it wasn't even blue collar; it was no collar. In the late 70s, it had close to 20% unemployment. Walmart made that worse.
I went to college in a small city and then moved to a big city on another planet (MA --> TX does indeed equal space travel) and finally settled down in a very large city, where I live right in the middle of it. However, I do live in a neighborhood of 45k that is called "small town in the big city" due to the historic districts and strong sense of local community.
My uncle was National FFA President in the mid-60's. Then he became a successful lawyer. Now he's in federal prison for securities fraud. Fun times. We've actually had three national presidents from my hometown. Two during the late 90's/early 00's, I believe.
Anyway, I also grew up in a small town. We got our first stop light when I was 13. They now have three. There was one fast food joint (DQ) when I was growing up. Since the town is located on the interstate, they now have several chain restaurants, including a Cracker Barrel at the exit, which is about 7 miles from "downtown". K-12 (for the whole county) is all on one campus and shares one cafeteria.
We didn't have bring your tractor to school day, but I did have a classmate give a demonstrative speech on how to castrate a pig. He brought a piglet from home and castrated it during class. I helped him hold it down since he was having issues talking and castrating at the same time.
19 of us, out of a graduating class of 29, went through preschool through graduation together.
Nothing is open on Sundays. 3 churches for 200 people. No alcohol sold, although wild parties with Americans are sought after invites. Also, locals love to host Americans, as an excuse to stock up on booze (from another island). You can buy ice cream after Wednesday night meetings. I don't know how many restaurants they have. It varies between 0 and 2.
Water is what you collect off your roof and store in your cistern.
Growing up, there was only a party line until I was about 8 when they installed phone lines for the first time. Power was from an on island generator which usually went out a couple hours a day. When power is out, so is water. One night my friends were decorating us with makeup, when the power went out. They finished by flashlight. To get it off, I tied a jumprope to a beach bucket to dip into the cistern to get water.
Roughly 70% of them have the same last name, as most (including my family) can trace back to the original Loyalists who settled the island, so everyone goes by Mr/s firstname. There's a post office, where you collect your mail, so you just send it to Island Name, Bahamas.
Once you've finished 8th grade, you're on the ferry to another school. They have installed plumbing at the school, but when I went there (never full time), they still had outhouses in their 2 room schoolhouse.
But, now, things have changed so much. They have cable and internet, power from the "mainland" (ie the bigger island), cell phones. They still just have the 1 post office, though. I think there are 2 banks, open 2 days. Woohoo. They also have a firetruck some American donated, but it's too big to go down any of the streets.
We currently live in a small town in rural Ohio. We live in a big farmhouse, but the fields are grown over.
I grew up in a different small town in Ohio. We had one stoplight and one of those blinking stoplight. DH grew up in a series of military bases both overseas and in the US, an inner city type area, and eventually the suburbs. My hickness scares him at times, but he's starting to get used to the country.
Grew up in suburbia, still live in suburbia. The city I grew up in has around 90,000 people. City I live in now is around 45,000.
Plenty of Targets, way too many chain restaurants.
I grew up in Charlotte, N.C., which always felt "too small" to me, maybe because both of my grandparents lived 5 driving mins away and my uncles, aunts and cousins were always around.
First chance I had to get to what I thought was a real city, I jumped. I live in D.C. now. I will probably never move to a bigger city, but I will likely never live anywhere like what you described.
I don't live there any more, but my home town was hick to the core. In addition to the usual rural funness, my favorite thing was the train. When I lived there if you wanted the train to stop you had to tell the dude who part time ran the Amtrak station at least a day in advance, because he had to plan to drive a few miles up the track and hang a lantern up to get the train to stop.
Grew up in Tampa Bay which is a mid sized city. I moved to south bend, then Baltimore where, thanks to a quick decision, I lived in the "wrong "neighborhood but I loved it. I then moved to London, then back to South Bend, then back to Tampa bay.
All were so different, but I've never lived in a tiny town. South bend was the least like the others, but it still isn't a small town. I am fairly sure I would be miserable in a small town. It's just nms. I enjoy mid to large cities.
I grew up in a NO-stoplight town in the Midwest.
1 small grocery store (about 5 aisles), 1 diner, 1 gas station on the outskirts of town by the interstate.
Consolidated school district - 7 little towns fed into our school and I still graduated with only 60 students. Too small for a football team.
I would never want to go back to that town, but the older I get, the more I realize how great small towns can be, especially for raising children.
I didn't actually grow up in a town. I grew up in the middle of nowhere surrounded by woods and farms about 30 minutes outside of a mid-sized town/suburb of a small city. Our property was surrounded by enough woods to get lost for days and we had no neighbors within eye-shot. I rode the bus with the kids who's parents owned a junkyard and my bus ride was about 45 minutes long.
My bus driver told me that I was the class of the neighborhood.
No FFA, but I was the secretary of my 4H club for 3 years (refused to run for higher office, but nobody else wanted to take the minutes).
But we were only an hour drive to the outskirts of philly, and the mall was just 30 minutes away. It was a good balance.
Then I moved to pittsburgh for school, and ended up in the DC-Balto corridor where all suburbs have joined together into one axis of overpopulated evil.
My Goodness...another food blog. Featuring: Macarons from a old post with a photo taken by my mom for a break from my crappy food photos!
I'm from a typical suburb, but H could probably give you a run for your money hick-wise. His hometown doesn't even have one traffic light, so you're already ahead of him there! there are 5 high schools in his county (4 according to the county website, for some reason they count his HS and the rival HS one town over as one, which is weird since both are huge) but I can't figure out where all the students live haha. His area is starting to get built up (its about an hour, 90 minutes maybe by train from NYC and about an hour from Philly driving, so its a prime commuting/"ex burbs" area) but his particular hometown and the town where his mom is from (the next town over) are pretty tiny and I get the impression the whole area was pretty rural and hickish twenty years ago, but now the yuppies ARE taking over.
I can't figure out what he and his friends did growing up besides drink in one friend's basement and run cross country. LOL. There is a local ice cream place where everyone went after school (very "dairi burger" from Sweet Valley High) and there is one bar where everyone goes when they are home. We still go to that one friend's house and drink. The town freaks me out bc you have two groups of people - those who left and are never coming back (DH, his best friends, etc) and those who never left and never will (H's parents.)
It's just all so funny to me bc I think people hear "New Jersey" and have this very clear image in their heads, and then you hear his stories and its like "wow, you really did grow up in the boondocks."
413!
I grew up in (another) former mill town in Western MA. When I was a kid, there was one stop light in it. Right in front of the police / fire department building.
I still remember my parents listening to the scanner (because that was a recreational activity!) and laughing because there had been an accident "at the lights" and one cop asking another, "which lights?" and the first responding, "Um, there's only one in town."
My mother had grown up there, more "in town" than we lived. We lived in a fairly rural area (at least two miles to the nearest anything besides houses and farms. Basic suburban houses, horses, sheep, turkeys that ran into the road, a herd of these down the hill from me:
My H grew up in even a more rural area. He likes to say it was a town of 1,000 people, and 10,000 sheep, goats, and cows. In Connecticut. He was in 4-H (he did goats).
But, where my hometown was old-mill no-collar, H's was New England charming. To the extent that when Renee Zellweger was married for like five minutes to Kenny Chesney and wanted to go all country, she bought a house there and had it renoed. It's quite beautiful, you can see the listing for it (at a bargain price of $1.5M for 39 acres) here: http://www.courant.com/business/real-estate/hc-renee-zellwegers-pomfret-farm-for-sale-20111212,0,1618484.photogallery
There's nothing there. No retail at all (no drugstore or anything like that, though there are a lot of people with signs at the ends of their driveways selling eggs or fruit or whatever). There's a coffee shop, I think, but it might be in the neighboring town. There's an elementary school, but for high school the kids go to neighboring towns.
We now live in the sketchy section of a highly desirable Seattle neighborhood. (Did you follow that?) It's vaguely suburban feeling though - detached single family homes (ours is on 1/4 of an acre). We can walk to the local parks and to 7-11, everything else is pretty much a short (10 min or so ) drive.
Our long term goal is to move somewhere more rural (where we can have goats!), yet still maintain easy access to the city... hopefully, we can make it happen.
I am the 99%.
Love.
I grew up in California's blazing hot central valley. It's as hick as you can get without actually living in the middle of nowhere.
Big city girl here as well (give me my Manhattan and I'm happy), but I actually spent a couple of years in copz' town as a kid, then moved to another small town (slightly larger - I think we had three stoplights
), and my parents and brother (and until two years ago, my sister) now live in another small town (two stoplights), so I at least think I have a fairly firm grasp on what it means to be a hick. 
And I don't know if I would say that the substance abuse in those town was / is any worse than anywhere else.
There was drinking and pot in my high school (a mix of three townships), and we had the one REALLY stoned kid who shot himself while on a bad acid trip, but I don't think the abuse levels were out of control. "Fun" was driving around to get lost, or going to the "big" town ten miles over to hang out in Wal-Mart, or yes, getting an older friend to buy us booze. But isn't the latter what happens in most high schools around the country?
"You don't get to be all puke-face about your kid shooting your undead baby daddy when all you had to do was KEEP HIM IN THE FLUCKING HOUSE, LORI!" - doctorwho
Yup - I've got an Uncle Junior as well. Does that solidify my rep as a (former) hick?
"You don't get to be all puke-face about your kid shooting your undead baby daddy when all you had to do was KEEP HIM IN THE FLUCKING HOUSE, LORI!" - doctorwho
One night my grandparents got into a boating accident when one of the lights on a rock/island (maybe 100 sq ft island) had gone out. It was my aunt who heard and answered the mayday which was pretty darn scary. The rescue team (from the 3rd biggest city in the country) strapped my grandma to a shower door to immobilize her. Way to be prepared, guys.
There's still not a hospital on their mainland. People either have to fly to Nassau or the States for the majority of treatment.