What Would Your Ideal Town Look Like?

I believe in visualization: Imagine your life, see all the details, and that is a means to manifest your “ideal" life. I could tell you what my ideal home would look like down the last detail…well, where is that home? Is it in a city, small town, middle of nowhere. Let me show you:

I saw this small community in a movie once, don’t remember the name of the film. It was a bunch of mobile homes in a wooded area—not too heavily wooded to black out the sun. Not conifers, the oaks trees we have back in California. So, I imagine a place like that, houses of various sizes, most well under 1000 square feet. My idea would be around 300 square feet but I could make do with 250. Just enough space outside for a couple of vehicles and a small garden. A picnic table to sit on and watch birds or the sunset. How big of community? Maybe a dozen and a half homes.

Connecting this community with the town is a meandering but paved path. There is also a road for cars, obviously, but you can also bike or walk along this path. Maybe it’s a quarter mile long, easily walkable even in one’s wrinkley years. You get to the village and there’s one building from the end of the nineteeth century facing the town park where the path ends. The building houses a bookstore, single screen movie theater, and a combo bar and restaurant. The bookstore would have both new and used books. Maybe the back room would have a branch of the public library where you could pick up books ordered from other branches. The bookstore would have to have at least one cat because every bookstore needs a cat. In Petaluma, we had this movie theater called the Plaza and it switched out movies every day. They played old films and charged a dollar (in the early 80s). That would be this movie theater. old movies, cult movies, things like that. A set up where you could bring food and alcohol in (we have theaters with that feature here in Portland).  The restaurant would be a pod set up: A couple of stands selling a variety of foods with a dining area in the middle. The bar would look like dive from the 70s, vinyl booths and everything playing mustache rock and R&B from the 70s and 80s.

The building would face and open onto the town square, a path running along the front of it (that connects to the path leading to the housing community). The park wouldn’t have to be large, but would have winding paths, a gazebo, small pond with fish or reaching to a small stream like a creek. On one end of the park is a museum for old/interesting cars. Maybe there would be some old buses or farm trucks with tiny houses built on the back that could be air B & Bs for out of town guests. Next to this museum would be a parking lot for out of town visitors.

So, there it is, my ideal town. Now I just need to come up with a million dollars and create it, right?