Size of woodworking shop proportional to distance from a Major City

I have come to find out that the size of one's woodworking shop, is directly proportional the distance from a major city.

For example, when I lived in Hyde Park, Ohio, I was about 12 miles from Cincinnati, OH and I started to have a decent set of tools for woodworking. Then when I moved to San Francisco my shop went to zero! Of course this may have been due to space, which I had about zero of that. So no woodworking shop.

Now that I'm back in the suburbs I've reopened my shop and begun adding to it. My latest and greatest purchase is the Ryobi Mitre Saw below which is AWESOME. I don't know how I had a shop without one of these handy tools. I posted a whole seperate entry about it on my blog if you're interested. It includes my reasons for not buying DeWalt anymore and instead buying Ryobi.



So back to my story. I'm in Reston, about 20 miles outside of DC and my shop is little and mobile. It occupies some of the garage and frequently has to be packed up depending on the garage needs. Now my friend Paul lives in Ashburn and has a much better shop than I do. He has an entire dust collection and air filtration system. Plus a much better table saw, a drill press, and a router table. Ashburns about 35 miles from DC.

So I imagine, if I went even futher out, maybe past Leesburg, I'd probably find Norm Abraham, Master Craftsman.