Work, ex, work again, ex again, finally despised the east enough moved for once to where I wanted to live versus someone else.
I'm half way between my family and my wife's family. We compromised that way, and also got the advantage of never having family just pop over unannounced.
Northern Utah is nice if you like cities and want things like restaurants, shopping, airports, nightlife, concerts and other special events, that sort of shit while having the great outdoors a short drive away. I fucking hate cities and the company I work for has zero operations in the state, so I'm perfectly happy where I am.
True story, just last month the wife and I were driving across Nebraska to hide out in a nice little place in the sticks on the Missouri River. Our fastest route would have taken us through the outskirts of little old Lincoln, and we drove an hour out of our way to not go through Lincoln because even that is too big of a city for us to want to put up with if we can possibly avoid it. We already knew we had a night in Omaha coming up the same weekend, but that was worth it to see a triple bill show of Alice Cooper, Def Leppard and Motley Crüe. There's what gets us to a city and not much less, our tolerance for city life bullshit is very low and must be made only necessary.
I'm dreading next week where I have to spend five days in the suburbs of KC for work. That and I hate KC BBQ the way they want to serve it. Yep, I went there KC fans, your sauce sucks. Learn how to let the dry rub be the ultimate flavoring instead of dunking it in liquid sugar to ruin all the best smoke and crusting. They instantly know I'm from out of town when I tell them no sauce, and I'm proud of it. Enough side tracking though...
There is absolutely nothing wrong in my mind with living 80 miles away from the nearest WalMart, and residing in a county the size of Rhode Island with a population of a couple NYC blocks. We're both happy we have careers that living in a rural setting is actually an advantage, and also both glad this type of lifestyle is not for 95% of those out there.