Let me try again while the day has gone by. You're not the only one who doesn't understand my point.
The correct measure of distance is not something like miles or kilometers. It's time, that is minutes or hours.
Thus your 125 mile distance if that had really good roads that could be an hour and a half trip by car. If you had high speed rail that could be under an hour. If you were a fighter pilot and had permission to use a fighter drive at max speed just minutes (that is costs and the environment is not a concern). Each of those enables something very different about the life of the people who live in those areas.
Thus, when you say it's a lot more than two hours for you to make that trip because of whatever reason, I can in turn infer that this is a major trip that people are making and in turn they're not making it very often. It is fine to make that as a vacation, but if you were to move there permanently, that means you're going to have to find all new friends. You can still go visit the old friends, but it's not something you're going to do very often.
If you just said it was an hour and a half, then if you got an offer to move that far, say a better job, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal because you could still go visit your friends and family fairly often. It's not something you would do every day and so you would have to find some new friends, but you could also keep your old friends.
If somehow you could do that trip in half an hour, then you could just move there and it would not change anything else about the rest of your life to move. Everyone you currently know, all your friends and family, they're easily within reach of just going to visit anytime you feel like it.