The Joys (And Pains) Of Small-Town Living

Today I chose A Regal Image as the fractal for this post--which is about life in the town of Corona. Corona means "crown" in Latin"--thus A Regal Image! So--on with today's commentary...
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Ten months ago--to the day--Robyn and I left Orange County for the bucolic wilds of the Inland Empire. At the time gas was nearly five bucks a gallon and the daily drive through the Santa Ana Canyon (even though Robyn would be going the "other" way) was a prospect to be feared. I won't lie to you: I didn't want to go. I tried to figure any and every angle that would allow us to stay in the OC but eventually had to come to the realization that it just wasn't going to happen...
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Turns out moving to Corona didn't completely suck! We have pretty much the same shopping and chain-dining we had in Orange County--only out here the places aren't usually as crowded and the service tends to be better. Yes, we have hotter and cooler temperatures (and A LOT more wind) but we make up for a lot of that with the "Sundowners"--winds that come in late in the afternoon to cool us down. We don't nearly have the traffic nightmares to deal with as we did in our old home: yeah, we've had the occasional back-up but nothing like what we used to deal with on a regular basis. Robyn traded a half-hour commute (under optimum conditions) to a ten-minute ride on rural roads. We get more "bang" for our housing buck and our utility bills have actually gone DOWN (because we live in a newer, more energy-efficient structure.) We haven't yet found a really good Mexican Restaurant or a "good but inexpensive" Chinese" place but we have three pretty good Barbecue places close to us so it pretty much balances out.
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By and large the move to the I.E. has been very good for us. Still, every "Eden" has its snake--and we just found it. Yesterday Robyn and I were cruising South on I-15 on our way to Church when our car simply began to SLOW DOWN. Didn't matter what we tried we just kept going slower and slower until Robyn decided to pull over to the shoulder. A quick call to the Auto Club got a tow out to us in less than fifteen minutes but then we discovered NOTHING was open in the way of auto shops. Mind you, I know we'd have had problems finding something in Orange County but we could have gotten in somewhere: not here though... We ended up getting towed home and then we discovered the other problem where we live. Nothing is close and there's no mass transit. Things could have been worse but it was still frustrating. (Of course, the places we called all returned our calls today so I'm guessing they wanted our business. I wonder how many shops in Orange County would have done that?)
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Ah well--maybe it wasn't really that bad.
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'nuff said.