Originally Published: April 5, 2010

I like big cities, really, I do! Where I grew up, in Central New Jersey, I could drive 45 minutes to New York City, 60 minutes to Philadelphia, 3 hours to Washington, D.C., and 5 hours to Boston. One of the greatest things about living in Bellingham is that Seattle and Portland are only 90 minutes or 4.5 hours to the south respectively, and Vancouver is only 90 minutes north.

I love big cities…but I wouldn’t want to live in one.

For one thing, I’d miss items like this in the local paper:

Mallard Ice Cream to introduce new flavor at Sunday event

BELLINGHAM – An ice cream social to celebrate the naming of a new Mallard Ice Cream flavor will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, April 11, at The Leopold Ballroom, 1224 Cornwall Ave.

The new name and flavor will be kept secret until its Sunday debut. All that has been revealed so far is that the ice cream will be in honor of Kulshan Community Land Trust, a nonprofit organization that provides affordable homeownership to people of modest means.

I love seeing people I know wherever I walk, I love that there’s usually only 1 to 2 degrees of separation here, I love that it takes me no more than 15 minutes to get from my house to the farthest parts of town that I regularly visit, and most trips are 5 to 10 minutes, I love locally-owned businesses, like Mallard Ice Cream, that become community institutions.

I know these these things aren’t really nonexistent in big cities, but I sure wouldn’t like Bellingham half as much as I do if they didn’t exist here.