I went through the same things--still do to a certain extent--and I was a middle child. I also felt restless living in a larger city with my college friends after graduation. Since then, I've lived in Taiwan; Honolulu; Washington, DC; and two of the smaller Hawaiian islands.
There are two gifted angles here that I can see. One of them is the difficulty gifted children have in finding friends that are their intellectual peers. That can be magnified and much more difficult in small towns and rural areas. However, I went to a selective college in a small town and absolutely loved it. I now live in a town that has less than 10,000 people, but there's much more to do here.
The other gifted angle is what Dabrowski called over-excitabilities. There are a few of those that can make small town life unbearable for gifted children.
