What you might expect and what you least expect.

You've decided to get the hell out of Dodge and move to a home outside the city limits. You're sick of the crime, the pollution, the noise, and the claustrophobic feeling of your house being so close to those of your neighbors that their kids can spit in your windows.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Can I survive without pizza delivery?

2. Can I remember to gas up before leaving town?

3. Can I handle snakes, coyotes, dirt, dust, gravel roads, flies, rodents that eat every leaf off my landscaping, dirt, the strangest bugs ever to have evolved on the planet, and DIRT?

4. Is my sense of humor well developed enough that I can handle waking up to find a herd of 6 horses in the backyard, a loose 1800 lb bucking bull, neighbors who, if in Mayberry, would have had their bullets confiscated by Sheriff Taylor (If you aren't old enough to know what that means you'd best Google "Barney Fife" before you move to a rural location.) but since I am not in Mayberry they have their bullets and will run through my neighborhood using them in order to "pertect" me from "serspicious" characters.

If you have answered "No" to any of the above questions, please do yourself and others a favor and stay in town where you've paved over all the dirt, elbowed out the wildlife, get carjacked by people who don't care about your "pertection" and the biggest thing peeing in your yard is the neighbor's leashed Great Dane.

If you move onto a gravel road, and then 6 months later begin complaining loudly about the bumpy road and dust people will think little other than "so why did the idiot move to a gravel road?"

If you like noise, stay in town. Don't bring your noise out here. The rest of us moved out here to get away from your noise. If you like living within spitting distance of your neighbor, don't bring your mega-subdivisions out here, just stay in town and spit at your neighbors to your heart's content. If you don't like a view, stay in town behind your brick walls because we like to see things out here.

If you are just looking for enough space to disappear in so that the in town cops don't catch you, remember what I said about looking up "Barney Fife". Just looking "serspicious" out here can get you shot, because there's a fool with more bullets than brains and way more adrenalin than good sense on every gravel road. You will wish for the good old days when cops were the worst things you had to worry about.

If you want to get out of town because you just don't get along with your neighbors, do some soul searching before you move to the country because the same things that make your neighbors dislike you in town probably won't make a good impression in the country either and out here there's a 20-30 minute drive to the nearest hospital.