Our Journey To The Country

Kelli and I were married in 1984 and soon began our quest to find a place in the country where we could live and raise our kids.

Before that I was pretty heavily into moto-cross racing which I did for most of my teen years and into my twenties. One of the things I enjoyed about it, was that it took me into lots of different rural area's, since you usually didn't find moto-cross tracks in close proximity of civilization. (That's me on the left, 371) Usually they were located off the beaten path next to some farmers field. It wasn't unusual to see cows grazing off in the distance even as hordes of racers kicked up thunderous dust storms beneath the spinning wheels of their high powered off-road motorcycles. Even though I've always loved being out in nature the competition of a good race has always excited me. Moto-cross racing gave me the best of both worlds. I always returned to suburbia with country dust in my teeth. Ah, those were the days.

Racing took me all over the place, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and even Florida once, so at an early age I got a pretty good idea what middle America was really like. I did have a dream for a while of having my own moto-cross track. I figured I could do that and homestead at the same time. As it turned out, where we finally settled here in northern Wisconsin, there was already a moto-cross track 3 miles down the road. I've helped out there every year for the past 7, 1/2 years and soon came to the realization that I probably wouldn't have cared for all the headaches that go along with it all. There are a lot of people involved and administrating that goes on, in order to coordinate everything, to make it happen. Not really my cup of tea. So I just help out, see a lot of good racing and go home at the end of the day with no strings attached.

Anyway, we spent years looking for just the right place to settle down. At first we looked pretty much just in Illinois. We narrowed down our search to the far west side of the state in the Galena area. It was beautiful over there along the mighty Mississippi with all the rolling hills and historic atmosphere. Galena was once home to Ulysses S. Grant. The entire town is restored in keeping with the 1800's time period.

We spent many weekends there driving around looking at land. We even bought a mobile home that sat on the edge of a pasture. It was situated on high hill over looking the river. The scenery was breath taking.

We still lived in Zion but, used the mobile home as a base from which to do our land searches, saving us quite a bit in motel costs. Unfortunately after a short time the farmer who owned the lot had a friend who wanted to put their mobile home on that spot and when the lease was up we had to move. The problem was we didn't have any land yet so we wound up selling off the mobile home to someone who did have land.

That kind of took the wind out of our sails as far as looking in that area. We then started looking north to Wisconsin. To be continued….