I lived a significant percentage of my life in rural towns across the US. While I really enjoy spending time in rural American towns because it is very comfortable and familiar for me, I am under no delusions about what actually living there entails. The lack of access to goods and services even for those that fit within the economic class of the town (which I did last time I lived in one) is inadequate enough that it is considered normal to drive 50-100 miles each way once or twice per week to get to a "real" city for various errands. You spend a lot of time in vehicles; instead of spending hours each day stuck in traffic, you spend hours covering distance at speed.
By the way, a 250k population city (i.e. larger than e.g. Geneva, Switzerland) is a very different animal than your average rural town, which is more commonly thousands to tens of thousands of population. I find cities in this range (also lived in these) to be the worst of both worlds, being neither as rural or intimate as a small town while also having few of the benefits of a real urban city. Of course, this is a personal preference.
Fort Collins is also a college town, and has a fairly educated population.
And if Fort Collins is too big for your taste, there are a ring of smaller towns (Loveland, Ault, Windsor or Westminster or something to the north) maybe 10 miles away.
Note well: It is my impression that this is my ideal. I've never lived there.
I live about an hour west of Boston which is certainly close enough to go in for a tech event or theatre/dinner for the evening. But my house is a lot cheaper than it would be in the city or a more expensive near-in suburb and you simply wouldn't be able to get the land I have near-in.
I get a lot of the advantages of a semi-rural lifestyle while still living close to decent supermarkets and having access to pretty much anything I would want within an hour.
Good schools.
Many HN readers don't have kids so they don't realize what a profoundly important factor this is when choosing where to live for many people. Once you have kids, their well-being and opportunity in life typically becomes the dominant attribute you're trying to maximize.
Parents would live in an active lava field where it rained urine every afternoon if the schools in the area were top notch.
Schooling is generally expensive. Nothing compares to one-on-one attention from a skilled, experience teacher and that doesn't scale, so to have a better school, you really need to simply have more money to put into hiring more and better teachers. In the US, a lot of school funding comes from local taxes, which means the amount of money schools have varies widely [0].
You could argue that this shouldn't be the case and that schools should be funded more equally out of larger pools. But if you are a parent with some money, it is your logical incentive to want to use that to improve your own child's schooling, so money naturally tends to flow towards schools that have more wealth children.
Many of those local taxes are local property taxes, so often the places that are affordable to live are by the very same process places that don't have great schools.
There's a nasty feedback loop here. You want your kids to go to good schools. The best schools have lots of rich parents. Those parents can afford expensive housing. Thus, most of the places with good schools have expensive housing.
Good government can and does push against this instinct, but it is a difficult, uphill battle.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...
Teaching is important, but I would argue that even more important are the goals and resources of the other students, which correlate nicely with wealth/income of their parents, and hence the neighborhood, and hence the school they all attend.
This is all barely noticeable when everyone is not so far apart on the wealth/income ladder, but over the past few decades, as that gets wider and wider, the data gets clearer and clearer about the consequences.
It certainly doesn't seem to here in the UK, where quite a few of the top schools are old fashioned 'public schools' located in rural/semi rural areas.
I also highly value being able to watch non-mainstream movies in a real cinema and I also very much like being able to physically touch and purchase books from a real bookstore. All of these things are impossible for me to do were I to move to a small town.
When both parents work a high end job, chances are the car gets dropped off at a mechanic to change the oil or for a tuneup. And many meals are carry out or in restaurants.