How to move close to parents... but not too close?

Post date: 2020-01-22 14:23:32
Views: 164
We currently live a very long way away: multiple days' drive, or a full day of flying. We want to be much closer. We would not be completely unopposed to moving back to our hometown, but would need a pretty strong case made for that to happen. Have you moved back to your smallish hometown (or close to it) and loved it? Have you done this and regretted it?

We'd like to be close to our parents as we start our family. We are from a small college town in the tri-state area of Iowa-Illinois-Missouri where both of our sets of parents live. We are in our early 30s.

We don't have strong ties to our hometown besides our parents -- most friends have moved away. My wife lived under 2.5 hours from our hometown while working after she graduated from college, and loved being able to decide on a whim to go home for a weekend.

We are also starting a family and from sibling's experience know that traveling much farther than 5 hours with young ones can be prohibitive sometimes. Is there a distance/time when making a weekend trip become almost impossible with children? Or when does the inertia become too much for either party (us or our parents)?

Additional snowflakes to help answer an obvious follow-up of "where to live in a 3ish hour radius": I'm a librarian at a university so would fit most naturally at a college or university, but wouldn't mind pivoting to public librarianship. She also has experience working as staff at a college. Our current grad school town is the largest town my wife has ever lived in, and we tend to like the slower pace, open country way of living.

Our ultimate dream is to buy a home with some land to have a few animals on. We are happy to defer this dream for now, as it probably doesn't make sense financially.
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