If you just started following our blog, I’d like to give you the “Cliff’s Notes” version of the past 6 months.

Josh and I first traveled to South Texas on our honeymoon in May 2016. We spent a few days in San Antonio, and a few days in Port Aransas (Port A if you’re local!). We fell in love with the little island, and decided that “someday” we would move to Port A.

Fast forward to the craziness that was 2020 and the pandemic. I started working from home full time. We started wondering if we could make the move sooner rather than later. I spoke with my supervisor at work, she said she didn’t see any issue with me working remote long-term. We woke up on a Wednesday and decided that night when I got off work, we were going to start the drive down to Texas to look at properties! We absolutely fell in love with one of the properties, and before we were back in Colorado, we submitted an offer and were under contract.

We moved in to our home November 10, 2020 after the longest three day cross-country move ever. It was a long and stressful drive, but we made it! As we were getting settled in, we realized that the previous owners did very little in the way of maintenance while they lived here. We had to make a few large purchases… a zero turn mower to mow ALL our grass and a tractor (because every ranch needs a tractor)! Our property had a partial fence, that we needed to complete ASAP. This was important to us to complete right away in order to keep predators out and away from any livestock we might choose to house. We hired a company to complete the fence for us, and Josh learned a lot from the crew over the week they were here. Neither of us knew anything about building or maintaining a fence.

We met our neighbors, the Garza family. They have become like our family here. Omar, and his wife Cecilia, and their son Diego. Their whole family has been a blessing to us. They informed us of the best places to shop, where to find feed for our animals, they cooked for us (Omar is a fantastic grill master!) and Diego has helped us out with manual labor on the ranch. While I was working inside, Josh and Diego were out and about on the property fixing things up. (Eventually, I also became a laborer…but that’s a story for another day!)

We worked hard to make some upgrades to the property. The perimeter fence was the most important, followed by replacing the fence around our patio which was rotting away. We survived the coldest weather South Texas has seen in 20 years.

Omar raises sheep and goats. He gave us two sheep (not goats, like we thought!) to get us started on our ranch. Two goats were soon to follow. We added chickens and baby chicks to our flock, and a livestock guardian dog.

In the months we’ve been here, we’ve experienced a lot. We’ve loved, we’ve lost. We’ve cried happy and sad tears. We have poured blood, sweat and tears onto every acre of this property… and we wouldn’t trade one single moment for the world!