After having read the responses to my original posting on this thread, and having thought about it a bit, I may have been failing a few "reality checks" about my perceived implications of the burdens of my medical condition.
I am "chained" to large cities, and I'd rather not be.
I know that Wyoming has sufficiently large cities and hospitals.
But I associate cities and freedom as being mutually exclusive.
Perhaps Wyoming's cities are a bit less repressive than cities of a similar size in other states.
Nevertheless, I am in the slow process of trying to sell my wife on the idea of Wyoming.
(I'll toss that in another post)
If you are in central illinois you are surrounded by civilization at all times. LaSalle/Peru at one time was my
ideal for being in a cityish area without being in an actual city. Unfortunately, Illinois is also kind of dingy by my mindset. Iowa is home, but unfortunately its a home that has become too small since I've been all over
it for too many years and seem to know people who know everyone else.
Wyoming, which I've been to all of once is the middle of nowhere beyond south dakota. It's not totally beyond all civilization, but if diesel gets up to $18 a gallon you had better have a good stash of MREs, smoked and cured wildlife, and know which farmer markets to shop.
You could be hurting for a little while if civilization destabilized, or if yellowstone exploded.
While I mentioned that they have pretty good medical care to patch up the miners and working slobs, I forgot to mention that EMS service in the ass end of nowhere really really sucks. If you screw up and can't cover your own butt for a few hours, you might die. But then, this is the case in Iowa as well if you pick the wrong time of day/week to get hurt.
The police dispatcher might laugh her butt off at you if you complain about the cows mooing at odd hours of the night, or the smells from a farmer spraying pig waste all over his fields, or a neighbor dozing his property, dynamiting something, chainsawing trees, or making his own figure 8 track on ten acres and raising hell with his redneck friends on weekends.
Forget complaining to anyone about anything less than actual emergencies involving fire, death, flash floods, and tornadoes.
Freedom means you can do a lot without someone trying to say you can't do it because it annoys them, it also means you are free to be so stupid that you can get killed without someone noticing. In a town of some size, say 12,000-60,000, forget about it, avoid chainsawing into a major arterial area on sundays and you should be fine.
But when it comes to finding that "dream house" 30 miles and two 8,000 foot passes through the mountains away from civilization, you might want to ponder over the implications just a tad.
