Ways living in a small town prepares you for travel
What do you think of when you picture living in a small town? Do you picture a town with 20,000 people like some “city-slickers” I know do? Do you picture a “town” of 15 people in the middle of nowhere with tumbleweeds rolling rampantly through the metropolis like a John Wayne movie? As I can only write out of my experience with living in a small town, my little farm town only has about 1,200 people, just for reference.
Here are some ways that living in a small town might prepare you for traveling:
You know how to find your own entertainment. There have been very few things that I can remember happening in my hometown that are genuinely entertaining. There is not a movie theater. You can go to high school basketball games, but most entertainment is school-centric. We have a town festival once a year. That’s about all I can think of that actually happens in my hometown. But you can get creative with how you get that outlet, beyond just Netflix. You probably have been out to someone’s house in the middle of nowhere and had a bonfire and enjoyed throwing things into the fire. I remember when I was in high school the exciting thing was to drive to the nearest Walmart that is about 25 minutes away and walk around with my friends. If you can find your Friday night entertainment in a basic Walmart (not even a superstore), I’m sure you’ll be able to find something to catch your fancy somewhere new.
You have practice with driving long distances for essentials. With living back at home now, I know that when I want to really go grocery shopping and get a lot of my favorite goods, I have to drive about an hour away to get the “good” groceries. And you definitely know what I mean about finding the “good” groceries. I can’t say how many times while traveling using that perspective has helped me. If it takes an hour by metro to go to the foreigner grocery store that sells taco seasoning and tortillas and you only have experience with the 5 minute drive to your store of choice, you get a lot more frustrated by the process than someone from a small town.
You know how to make do with what you have. While traveling, there are a lot of times where you don’t have options. It’s 3am and your red eye flight was delayed 2 hours and you’re really hungry and all the stores are closed. Chances are that if you’re from a small town, you’ve prepared for this moment and have some sort of snack stashed in your carry-on, but otherwise you probably would check and see what time the food places open, then take a nap.
You probably know some random essential life skills. It might have to do with being raised on a farm at my dad’s house, but I know a bunch of random skills that I wouldn’t have had if I had been raised in a city. I know how to change a tire. I know how to drive in snow and ice. (This skill is vastly underrated.) I have learned how to make entire meals completely from scratch. When you travel, you never know exactly what you’re going to experience when you get there. You’ve already had to learn to be adaptable to conditions so it should follow you into the future.
You have experience juggling many close relationships. If I trace back my ancestry, I am probably related to most of the people in my hometown, that aren’t move-ins of course (with move-ins categorized as someone who doesn’t have their parents or grandparents with the same hometown). There’s that saying that everyone knows everyone else’s business in a small town, and that’s just the beginning of it all. If my mom were to run to the Dollar General (the only real store in town), I could expect her to come back about 30-45 minutes later than she would actually need because she would run into someone(s) and get to having a long conversation. I can still remember most of my classmates’ birthdays after having graduated high school 6 years ago. You didn’t really have much of a choice but to get along with all your classmates because you were always stuck together in all the same classes until graduation. This understanding of how to maintain many relationships with the world around you (and under the microscope of knowing whatever you did would be back to your parents and around town before you got home) translates well into travel. As you go more and more places, you undoubtedly will make friends from all over the world. To maintain these friendships and connections, you use these same skills that you learned while being in your small town.
You learn how to dream. The funny thing is about small towns is that when you’re in high school, you can’t wait to leave and go do new things (or at least that’s how it was for me). My creativity was constantly being engaged in dreaming up what I wanted to do when I grew up. If anyone ever wants to leave their small town, you have to dream of how the world could be in order to do something new. When you travel, you are constantly dreaming about how things might be once you begin your journey or reach your destination. Sometimes your dreams are wildly wrong, but sometimes they get blown out of the water with how much better the reality truly is. If I had never dreamed of exploring something new and imagined what else is out in the world, I never would have met some of the most amazing people I’ve met while traveling. I have friends all over the world that I am so thankful for, and that I’ve got to experience some of their worlds around them. Beyond blessed.
This may not be the most expansive list of things you could have been unwittingly trained for by living in a small town, but I would love to hear what things you would place on it. All too often small towns get overlooked for what they can offer you as you develop into the person you’re becoming. I can’t imagine who I would be today if I didn’t have the experience of living in a small town.