Our search for a new homestead began in earnest in 2019. I wasn’t going to move to a place I have not seen in person. If you don’t consider winter our place in Missouri is paradise, I had no intention of moving somewhere questionable.  This decision involved more than just my family, my mother had moved to our sawmill property and we had put a mobile home where the duplex burned on that property. My mom wasn’t keen on moving to Alabama, but she didn’t want to stay in Missouri by herself either. My brother has become my partner in my parts business, he has worked with me for the past two years so he was coming as well. Scouting a property with so many important parties involved gets complicated. We didn’t want to leave anyone out so we needed a large vehicle to scout or a small convoy. For better or worse we decided to buy a motor home with the idea we could camp on a prospective property and go wherever we wanted without the worry of getting to far from a hotel. With so many traveling in our group it was also thought a bathroom tagging along with us would increase the speed of travel by eliminating bathroom stops.

I am a very frugal person and I don’t have an excess of money so enter a 1988 Airex 35′ motor home. We purchased it for $1,500 dollars. This motor home could sleep our entire family and hopefully be the perfect scout vehicle. While everything was suppose to work on the motor home that was far from the truth. Multiple water leaks, a water heater, heating system and sewer repairs later we had it as ready to go as we could seeing as how we wanted to make the trip right after Christmas so my wife wouldn’t have to miss work. One month isn’t much time to get something together.

While the idea behind the motor home was good if I had to do it again I would have taken a couple cars and stayed in hotels. The Airex got horrible gas mileage, the best it got in the entire trip was 8mpg and it averaged around 6mpg. It’s top comfortable speed was 65mph, it could go faster but it was really revving the engine going faster. Luckily it did have working cruise control. Some engineer really needs kicked somewhere as the Airex only had a 20 gallon gas tank, that’s right 20 gallons and it gets 6mpg. We had to stop every two hours or less to refuel. That and it’s low top speed made for a very slow trip. Another lesson learned was no matter how good a tire looks if you don’t know it’s age replace it before a long trip. The Airex has a dually axle with an additional air ride stinger axle on the rear. It rides on 8 tires, we replaced the steer tires before the trip for what we considered an abundance of caution as all the tires looked good. Of the remaining 6 old tires only two made it back to Missouri. Four blowouts, one of those blowouts ended up taking out our water line and sewer line, luckily that was on the trip home.

We scouted our prospective Alabama areas after Christmas 2018 and into the first week of 2019. We originally planned on settling in Covington county, but after talking with some county officials we reconsidered and chose Geneva county which was more advantageous anyway. Covington county reassesses the value of property every time it sells, that equates to the new property owners paying much more taxes than the older property owners, it isn’t a fair system and we chose to avoid it. Geneva county reassess everyone on a schedule, the new property owner will not be paying anymore than their neighbor that grew up there. Geneva county is also slightly warmer, the entire eastern half of the county is in zone 8b. It is also closer to the largest city in the area which is Dothan Alabama.

Unfortunately it rained on and off everyday on our scouting trip. The Airex ended up having some roof leaks which never showed until you had a large amount of rain. Besides a breakdown in Birmingham during rush hour and the flat tires the Airex worked pretty well. We had some problems with the leveling system which died at a rest area in Florida. The Airex had electric jacks on each corner controlled from the cab, that way when you camped on uneven ground you could level the rig. On one stop the jacks wouldn’t go back up and we had to run a hotwire and go to each jack and bring it back up so we could continue our trip.

One thing that can make someone who hates winter very happy is leaving home with weather in the teens and enjoying the 70+ degree days in Alabama. It got as warm as 77 degrees during our week stay in Alabama in early January! We went from wearing coats and long johns to swimming in the ocean at Panama city beach. The difference is amazing and really sold me and my family on giving this move a try. So it was official, we planned on moving, just not sure when or how.

While I thoroughly enjoy having enough property to play farmer I was willing to make major sacrifices to enjoy the warmer weather in the south. I initially figured we would have to trade for a much smaller property when we moved south. Northern Missouri’s population has been shrinking for decades, that means there are more houses than people so buying some acreage with a fixer upper house is a real possibility and it can be done affordably. While land prices in the south were about the same maybe a little higher anything with a house brought a premium. Houses were easily twice the price in Alabama vs Missouri. I also didn’t want to buy another house made of wood and not built by myself, I wanted to build a real house built correctly. So our plan was to buy bare acreage, or ideally acreage with a rough but livable house or mobile home so that all the necessities were already there.

I figured 20 acres was the minimum amount of land that my family needed. That would give enough acreage to have a small woods, pond, some row crops and enough grazing ground for a small herd of cattle. Of course just like anywhere the land you seek may not be for sale when your ready, so we decided to get a base at-least and wait for the proper piece to come up for sale. We even considered buying a building in town. I couldn’t live very long in a city but it would have been neat for a short time.

After our scouting trip I returned to Alabama many times. My wife decided to apply for a job in Dothan and ended up getting hired. She rented a room and moved to Alabama in March. We looked at several properties over the next several months, two we would have purchased but somebody else was quicker on the draw. Finally I ran an ad that we were looking for a place and we ended up purchasing an acre and a half with a mobile home, a well, septic and electric. My mom who wasn’t a fan of the move wanted her own place in Alabama so our plan was to make this place hers and we would live on the place in an rv or something until the right place came along.

We purchased this property for $18,000 without seeing the inside and only seeing the outside at night. Water and well would run about $10,000 so I figured we couldn’t go wrong. What I didn’t see coming was the most disgusting property I have ever seen someone live in. The lady we purchased it from seemed a little off, but whatever everyone is different. What I didn’t catch is that she was legitimately crazy. She and about 20 chickens and cats had been living in the trailer for several years. Yes, you read that right chickens were living in the house free range. I don’t think she ever threw anything away, the inside of the house was full of chicken and cat poop and the entire yard was covered in trash. The place looked relatively presentable on the outside at first as most of the trash was well hidden with bushes and plants.

Since my wife was already down there at her new job we decided to make it work and cleaned for weeks. We hauled several 20′ cattle trailer loads of trash to the landfill and did our best to clean the property. If I could do it again a lighter would have been a better choice. My wife lived in a tent in the yard for a couple weeks while working on the place. I spent a couple weeks down there working but had to return to Missouri as our kids were still in school and we still had a farm and business to run.