About Us
Small Town Vibe: an origin story
My husband and I LOVE to travel, explore new places, meet new people, and experience new things.
Over the years, we have been fortunate enough to travel to other countries. for various reasons, we tended to avoid rental cars and instead we chose city center locations to stay. We explored the neighborhoods on foot, coupled with some form of mass transit for more distant neighborhoods and day trips. We have consistently found that cities and towns in other countries are relatively easy to walk around to see many of the sites, as well as generally effective mass transit options. It gradually struck us how dependent we are on our car back home in the United States to do similar types of exploring.
Eventually we developed a road trip style in US towns and cities, where we plant ourselves in the town center for a few days and explore the local businesses and sights that we can walk to, as well as a couple of day trip drives to see the local sights. It turns out, there are plenty of places accessible by walking! We have found that many towns and cities have downtown areas that are being revitalized in ways that bring new energy to the area that is palpable to a visitor, and locals as well. We borrow the term ‘placemaking’ to describe the many ways community, business and civic leaders are improving their places to meet community needs. And we identify the resulting energy as the ‘vibe’ of the place, be it a single business, a business district, or an entire town or region.
Why Small Towns?
Recently we have become particularly interested in smaller towns, with populations under 10,000. In our opinion, this size small town can often seem overlooked and underappreciated when compared to its bigger town and city counterparts. While visiting smaller communities with a ‘placemaking’ lens, it is readily apparent that many are doing the hard work involved with maintaining and revitalizing their places – we have visited some very cool small towns! Often they have beautiful historic buildings in their downtowns. Like all places, each small town has a feel and culture, in its aesthetics and its level of energy. We have come to think of the downtown as representing the general feel of a town – and refer to this feeling as the ‘small town vibe’.
SmallTownVibe.org is our way to showcase some of the amazing small towns we visit, by sharing our personal experiences and online research. In my own reading, i have found many interesting concepts associated with creating and evolving great places. I try to share some of these concepts and insights in our travel articles, when we see them in action in the towns we visit.
And while we enjoy the experiences gained while visiting new places and meeting new people, we find ourselves on an educational journey as well. With each new visit, we tend to compare and contrast, and try to learn what seems to work in some communities and ponder whether similar ideas could work in others.
One of the obvious learnings to us along the way is that local businesses are a critical component in creating a downtown Vibe – we encourage all to support them and shop local!
We hope you enjoy our journey as much as we do!
-Dawn & Jason (with road trip support from friends and family… Thanks to all!)
