Do you live in a small town?
I live in a town with a population of about 20,000. While that seems like a huge number, the whole town really gives off small town vibes. We have a cute downtown area, a lot of farms and homesteads, all the primary shopping places (Walmart, Kroger, Aldi, Rural King, Dollar Tree) and not too much else haha! In addition to our small town, we are surrounded by quite a few small towns around us. To get almost anywhere, we have to drive through multiple small towns.
One of these local small town libraries recently did a scavenger hunt in their downtown area. The task was to walk around and find 20 different art pictures hidden in store windows around the downtown area. We only found 14 of the pictures, but I think that some stores had put them up inside the store, and they weren’t open at the time that we walked around!
I walked around with my four kiddos and we enjoyed window shopping and even going inside some of the stores. We also stopped for a scoop of Ice Cream, and they had Kid Scoops for $1 each! Now that’s what I’m talking about! Here are some pictures that we took during our Scavenger Hunt walk around town…
This sign was so cute! Only in a small town 🙂
So many cute windows and homes along our walk!
Once some of the shops opened up, we went inside to browse..
I loved this fabric shop, especially since it reminded me of the market in Niger and all the aisles of vibrant fabric. This shop had their fabrics organized by color, with each little coral being a different color.
There were antique stores and Western themed shops…
There were little chic boutiques that I just adored…
And we ended our morning with some ice cream! It can’t be considered a small town if it doesn’t have an easily accessible ice cream shop!! Even the small town that I lived in in NE Pennsylvania had an ice cream shop!
Another thing that a small town does well is 4th of July Parades! We actually went to two parades and a street fair + fireworks this year. I sometimes have complicated feelings about being American (This mostly stems from spending the first 18 years of my life living as an expat in a 3rd world country), but I love a small town 4th of July…it just hits different, I promise.
What about you? Do you live in a small town? Have you visited a small town in the summer? It’s absolutely worth a visit- there may not be much to do, but the vibe is absolutely there.
That reminds me of the town I grew up in; which is 15 minutes away from the town we now live ii. Our current town is much smaller than yours with a population of 9,000 divided into 5 even smaller boroughs but we share the same schools, town hall, tax/voting rights, library, etc. We have zero ice cream shops, or department stores, or even grocery stores! I think we sometimes have parades but no fireworks either. We tend to just drive into the other nearby small towns to enjoy their parades, fireworks, stores, and the like.
The town we live in has a population of 2300. We have a small grocery store, Dollar General, the cutest coffee shop, and a nice pool and thrift store. For restaurants we have Dairy Queen, Subway, a Mexican restaurant, and a local pizza/American place. So I would say we are pretty blessed for the town size! We have fireworks and a parade during our town days in August.