Fantasy meets reality

I am often asked the question, "Don't you wish you lived back then?" or "Don't you feel like you were born 200 years too late?"
My answer for these is easy - "No."
I love our life both homesteading and re-enacting at Renaissance Festivals and Folk Fairs. And we could not do any of it without automobiles and the internet!
We would not be homesteading in Fox right now if we had to get to a town via horse or foot - it takes 40 minutes by car. We could not have even gotten here without our major-mondo Dodge diesel pickup truck to haul everything.
And we really could not do both the festivals and the farming in any time other than the present. Our vehicles allow us to be in Louisiana one day and Oklahoma the next. Cell phones allow us to manage the farm, office and shop while traveling. Wifi lets us keep in touch with customers and track orders.
And, we could not make our living without the miracle of the World Wide Web. (Also we would be terribly bored without our music, news and research ability that the internet provides - and how would we identify those plants!) More than half our income comes in between our web store and our ebay store. While in days of yore we might not have needed this income, in days of now, we do. In some ways it is a vicious circle and we are working on ways to simplify things - but accepting some modern miracles will help us get to the point where we don't need as many modern miracles.
We got electricity at the farm today. It was sweet to be able to run the 14-inch electric chain saw. That saw weighs half what the gas one does. We now have a refrigerator for the first time in two months - and I'm almost not sure what to do with it! And lights that come on at the flick of a switch, instead of at the flick of a Bic... well, at the price of lamp oil, the electrics are cheaper.
Being on the grid with city water and city electricity will help us move toward our plan of being off the grid much sooner.
Life is much more fun when fantasy and reality are able to walk hand-in-hand.