The Great Off Grid Ozark Adventure: part 3
Note: This content was written out long before it was published here on the blog. So although this post is being published in early 2025, it was written several months ago. If you’re just finding this post, I recommend starting with part one here to get more background.
As we began looking at property again, we realized that we were most likely going to have to find something that was undeveloped. We had wanted to upgrade our pop-up trailer for a larger travel trailer anyway and we thought it would be good to have a backup to not be homeless while we built our new home, wherever and whenever that would be. We had been shopping for a while but we found a trailer near us that had a great layout. It’s hard to find one that isn’t huge, but can sleep a full family comfortably. It was cheap, because the roof had a leak and needed to be replaced. We looked at it and decided we could handle the repairs. We already had some rubber roofing material on hand from another project. Unfortunately, the water damage was worse than we thought and we had to do a lot more remodeling on it than we originally thought. I think we still saved money remodeling, but in the end, we got a trailer that we really liked. And most importantly, I loved working on it! I don’t really like remodel projects. Ok, I don’t like them at all. But for some reason this was different and I was able to have fun and learn a lot doing it.
After the trailer was finished and some time had passed , Mary was ready to start land shopping again. I had been chatting with another Realtor online and she had sent me some property listings. She seemed to have more of a knack for what we wanted and lived in the area that we were most drawn to. Eventually, we decided to take another adventure out there. 3rd time is the charm they say… Instead of flying, we thought it would be cheaper to take our travel trailer and we wouldn’t have to pay for plane tickets, car rentals, and lodging. Just a bit more in gas money. Well, we very much underestimated how much more gas money we would spend hauling 7 people, lots of gear, and a 25 foot trailer across the country. Then, the other thing we didn’t expect was that we would have car problems all the way there. It was intense, and stressful. We were having issues in the barren desert of Northern AZ in the middle of nowhere. We were just pushing to try to make it to Gallup NM where the nearest city was. However, we missed the turn to Gallup and I was turning around when Mary saw a sign to Farmington NM. She realized that she had cousins there, and it was closer to where we were! Said cousins might be reading this… if so, you were a life saver that week! I was able to park our trailer there, have a place with water, electricity, and tools! I did a ton of work on the car trying to chase down our mysterious issues. Finally, we hooked up again and took off. It seemed to run better at first, but we continued to have issues. It took us a long time to get there, but we made it! Our first few nights there were at an awesome RV park. Our realtor was amazing and we ended up moving our trailer onto her property. We became friends with their family pretty quickly and she has two sons that are our boys’ ages. Again, that was a HUGE blessing for us!
In all honesty, I’m still not 100% sure what was going on with our vehicle through Arizona. As I went through things to troubleshoot the issues, I found several things that needed to be replaced but I wasn’t confident that any of them were “THE” problem. In the end, I think it was just a simple issue with spark plugs. I replaced those as soon as we got to Missouri and that seemed to solve the issue. Either way, I learned a lot about this vehicle!
We looked at several properties, and we liked most of them. But we just kept coming back to the very first one we saw. It was 48 acres, and had some cleared land, and a small bit of creek going through the corner. In the middle of it was a seasonal creek bed and on the other side of that was a big forest. There were trails that had been cleared through it that made the land more accessible. What struck us there was the absolute huge variety of wild plants and herbs growing there. We saw quite a lot of things that are edible or medicinal. The place was really pretty and it felt peaceful! It was off the beaten path a little more than we had been looking, but we liked it there.
Our time to leave had come and while we were driving home we decided to put an offer on it. There was some back and forth on it and the owner had someone else he wanted to sell it to so it almost didn’t work out, but in the end, we bought it. One issue was that the access easement road was not ideal. It was a rough road and we weren’t sure it would be great for every day use, and we were not sure if we could get our trailer in there or things like materials to be delivered to make our home, etc. The person who owns the land we have to go through, suggested making a new easement on the south end of her property. We looked at it and thought it looked better but while we were there, we didn’t have permission to go walking along it. We just had a picture from the road. It was the last thing we looked at before we left. I think if we had really realized what we were getting into, we would have just offered to fix up that existing access road!
To be continued…
