The day I bought my lake cottage was one of the best days of my life. I wanted my land to be mine, and now a piece of it is. In the summer, there is not a more relaxing, beautiful, happy place in the world for me to be. I want to be close to my grandparents, to help them, and it works out perfectly for my mom to be able to stay with us and help me with both grandparents and baby.
The problem is, I’m so far from everyone else! My best friends, my sister, play groups, baby swimming lessons, etc. Just going to the grocery store takes an hour just in traveling time, round trip. Everything else takes an hour one way. I don’t mind driving, necessarily, but if I lived where everyone else does, we could just go for breakfast, drop in and say hi, or meet on a regular basis, and it wouldn’t be a whole big long outing. Not to mention the price of gas. I constantly struggle to try to schedule get-togethers with people in order to keep the loneliness at bay, but living this far from civilization means that I have to do a lot of the work; it’s a lot harder for friends and family to make time to come all the way out and see me.
I guess what I’m saying is, I sometimes feel quite isolated out here. I wish I had friends and family close by and I was surrounded by them most of the time, so that I could really enjoy my time alone (with Jo Jo), instead of struggling with loneliness.
Mother of All Things 
I would imagine the loneliness would really get to me, too. As much I love my alone & quiet time, I also need some sort of adult interaction every day or else I start to take a spiral into a not-so-good place mentally. It’s good that you have your mom and grandparents to talk to, at least. But I’m sure even that gets old after a while.
One day you can have a house in the city and your lake property, too. 🙂
I can hope!
I’ve always imagined that would be a difficult part of choosing where to buy and live.
Hmm.. Hopefully you’re able to make additional friends nearby and eventually have this as you vacation home.
I totally feel that ambivalence. I love so much about living in the country, but the driving time – particularly now with a toddler who has a deep and abiding outraged disgust towards ”bye-bye” – can really drag you down. In every way! Here’s hoping we both get that apartment in the city some day!
I empathize with this greatly. Living 5 miles from “town” and at least 15 miles from the nearest grocery store in the middle of 50 acres is very hard for a city girl like me. Hopefully circumstances allow for the best of both worlds in the near future.