We Closed On Our House Today, We are Officially “Homeless”

by Kristina Etter | Apr 18, 2025 | Lifestyle

We closed the sale of our house today, and it’s been a bittersweet moment in our lives as we become homeless by choice.

We lived a dream life for nearly a decade. We purchased a house in the mountains, surrounded by trees and natural beauty – but not people. We were an hour from the nearest grocery store and 90 minutes from the nearest city.

There are memes made about how we chose to live. In the meme, they ask, “Would you move here and give up social media for a million dollars?” Well we did it and didn’t need a million dollars to do it. We lived where the deer and the antelope roam, but the cell phone signal didn’t.

We had the remote, secluded mountain life that others dream of… and today, we traded it off for a camper.

Home Ownership Comes with Complications, Too

Yes, we’ve sold our sticks-and-bricks house and committed to life on the road in a rolling rectangle with wheels. Are we crazy? Maybe. But if you’ve ever lived on a rural mountain property, you already know: home ownership is not all white-picket-fence dreams and sun-dappled porches. It’s more like dry rot, driveway erosion, and propane tanks that only run out at 10pm during a blizzard at Christmas.

So, in honor of this monumental milestone, here are some of the real reasons we’re choosing full-time RV life over the so-called “security” of home ownership — especially in the mountains:

1. No Instant Gratification… Literally

Living in the mountains means you’re blessed with scenic views and soul-soothing silence — and cursed with no delivery options whatsoever.

No pizza.
No DoorDash.
No Uber Eats.
Not even Amazon Prime.

Two-day shipping? Try two-weeks-if-you’re-lucky and you better pray your package doesn’t get rerouted to “Undeliverable” because your driveway scares the FedEx driver.

2. Everything Breaks. Always.

Owning a home means you’re never not working on it. Roofs leak. Windows warp. Pipes freeze. Septic tanks burp up unpleasant surprises. Even your “low-maintenance” appliances conspire against you the moment you dare to take a weekend off.

Our cooking range once tried to kill us with a carbon monoxide leak.

And just when you think you’ve fixed everything, you realize nature has other plans. Spoiler alert: Chipmunks will destroy more insulation than you think, and if a squirrel wants in, it will get in.

3. The Grocery Gauntlet

“Oh, just run to the store!”

…Said no one who lives an hour and a half from the nearest grocery store, one lane road, mountain pass, and two elk crossings away.

A “quick” grocery run is a full-day commitment complete with weather window calculations, extra fuel, and a detailed route plan like you’re prepping for an excursion on Everest.

And don’t forget the cooler. You’re not coming home in time to keep your ice cream frozen or your edibles from melting.

4. Fire Season is the New Anxiety Season

If you’ve never lived through a Red Flag Warning, count your blessings.

The moment those words hit your weather app, your brain spirals:

• Do we have enough gas?
• Where’s the fire?
• What direction is the wind blowing?
• Should we pack the animals? The heirlooms?
• Wait — did we pay last month’s insurance premiums?

Fire season isn’t just scary — it’s existential. There’s nothing like standing on your porch and sniffing the air like an amateur meteorologist trying to decide if it’s campfire vibes or an incoming apocalypse.

Once you’ve experienced a wildfire, you’ll never look at a campfire the same.

5. Rodents, Rattlesnakes & Random Power Outages

Country living means cohabitating with the entire cast of a National Geographic special. Every critter wants in — and some of them will succeed.

You will:

• Battle mice in the closets.
• Scream when you lift the toilet lid and find a spider that could rent a car.
• Lose power randomly for “reasons” that no utility company can explain.

Bonus fun? When the power goes out, so does your well pump. That means: no lights, no water, no flushing, and exactly zero fucks given by the utility company.

6. Snow Removal = Full-Time Job

Living in the mountains sounds dreamy until you realize snow is your new boss, and it’s an overachiever. Luckily for us, we didn’t have full-time jobs or deadly commutes… so we would wait it out. But when you get with four feet of snow, you might wonder if you bought enough groceries to last.

You will shovel. You will plow. You will beg your truck not to slide off the icy roadways. You will learn to identify snow types like Eskimos and know exactly how many inches = cancel all plans.

Oh, and surprise storms? They’re just the universe reminding you who’s really in charge. The weather report may call for clear skies, but when it’s 44 degrees and you’re at 9,000 ft. snow and graupel are not your friends.

7. Isolation Is a Double-Edged Sword

Sure, the solitude is lovely… until you need a neighbor. Or a mechanic. Or a tow. Or a plumber. Or an emergency room.

Out here, it’s just you and your YouTube degree in DIY survivalism. Hope you watched that “How to Thaw a Frozen Pipe with a Hairdryer” tutorial before the storm knocked out your internet.

Have an emergency? No worries, it’ll only take an ambulance, the fire department, or the sheriff 20-30 minutes to come to your rescue – and they’ll likely show up with an attitude because they’re a volunteer that you just got out of bed at 2am.

8. You’re Always Behind Schedule

Rural life operates on mountain time, which is code for: “Nothing is on time.”

Contractors don’t show. Deliveries disappear. Mail takes a sabbatical. And don’t even try to schedule anything official like permits, inspections, or DMV renewals unless you’re prepared for an all-day wait.

So, Why are We Going Homeless by Choice?

Because freedom.

Because we’re tired of fixing things that break so that we can sit still in one place.

Because we’d rather deal with small, manageable chaos on the road than big, overwhelming chaos in one location.

Because we want to wake up in the desert, fall asleep by a river, and have the world as our backyard.

Most of all, because after years of doing everything “right” — the house, the property, the work — we realized something:

Home isn’t a place. It’s a choice.

Justifying Closing a Beautiful Chapter in Life

by Kristina Etter | Apr 10, 2025 | Lifestyle

Closing a beautiful chapter in our lives and moving on to the next adventure.

I had a moment this morning.

It dawned on me that we’re not coming back when we leave here, and the emotional weight of that hit me like a lead brick.

This has been our home for over 8 years, and we have built a helluva life here. But I’ve learned that humans grow, change, and evolve. We live through phases in life. This was a great phase, but it’s time to move on.

To balance those emotions, I try to remember that this isn’t a loss but an exciting adventure leading us to the next place we need to be. Although we’re leaving much of our trip to spontaneous adventure, believe it or not, there’s a method to our madness.

But what helps the most is remembering the things that made us put our house on the market in the first place.

The Skinwalker – Beginning of the End

I always said inviting strangers into your home is a numbers game. Eventually, you’ll end up with a rotten egg. We started hosting Airbnb guests in 2017 and were incredibly blessed with a “mostly” respectful guest list until June 2022.

We had some entertaining experiences with a few guests, but nothing prepared us for this guest. We’ll call him “Doug” for anonymity.

Doug was a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds (and on lots of other drugs) who showed up for his stay at 11 o’clock at night, ranting about killing demons in the desert in Utah. He was the second person we hosted who made me feel compelled to lock our bedroom door at night. But he made the first questionable guest look like a kitten.

The following day, I watched him medicate with a sublingual suboxone strip, and within 45 minutes, I watched him transform from a somewhat stable human being into a walking coconut. He spent an hour doing laps around my pool table, chanting “God-Country-Family” and mumbling about demons and his father while wearing a straw cowboy hat painted with an American flag.

While I won’t go into the entire, horrific story of his two-day stay, I’ll fast-forward to when we started receiving his mail a few weeks later. He left our house, went to a bank, and opened an account using our address. He attempted to establish residency in our home.

This 42-year-old man wreaked havoc on our lives and robbed us of our trust. His presence changed the air in our home.

I once told the entire story to young, Native American man who was visiting our house, and he looked at me wide-eyed, and said, “You hosted a skinwalker in your home.”

I believe him.

Friends and Frequent Abusers

Let me tell you what happens when you own a disc golf course – everybody in the disc golf scene wants to be your friend. They want unrestricted access to the course and any amenities you offer. And, preferably for free.

Once these people get comfortable, they take liberties they wouldn’t take with anyone else’s business.

One “friend” saw our success with our property and decided to be predatory to cash in on our efforts. He built a course, put it on UDisc, and took advantage of simply being near our highly ranked course. So, when one of our guests arrived to play his course before checking in at our place, he convinced them not to stay with us and to stay on his property instead.

We also hosted another group on numerous occasions – I cooked food and hosted this group like they were my own kids. Their drug-fueled stays frequently involved a variety of hallucinogens, drugs, booze and glow discs, but we never had any incidents – I let them do their thing. But by 2023, they had become so comfortable that they hosted a party with 78 people, in my home, and stiffed us on an agreed fee for the event. Truthfully, I don’t think they ever intended to compensate us for our hospitality.

That same weekend, a repeat Airbnb guest arbitrarily invited a 15-year-old child to our 21+ property without asking for permission. And said ‘child’ left the only negative review our course had ever received, saying he felt like he “almost died” on our course. Thus, this arrogant, entitled little brat tanked our 4.9 rating that we had worked tirelessly for 7 years to build.

I was just done. We immediately closed the course to “by appointment only.” We had lost our tolerance for disrespect.

The Reality of Aging

Let’s get a few hard truths out of the way, shall we? Aging is a sad fact of life. Death is inevitable. Time is limited.

Burying our parents is an unfortunate rite of passage that happens in life that helps us learn to appreciate time more. Just as there are lessons in life… there are lessons in death.

1. Healthcare matters – and I’m not talking about making monthly appointments with your doctor to fill your prescriptions. I’m talking about taking accountability for the bad habits contributing to your demise and doing something about it.
2. Stagnancy leads to complacency. As people age, they tend to stay home more, exercise less, and stop living. They live life through a silver smoke screen of Fox News and QVC from an armchair in the living room.
3. Collecting “stuff” you think might valuable someday is a cruel way to task your children with selling all your junk once you’re gone. Unless you’re investing in gold, rare paintings, or real estate, nothing is as valuable as you think it is.
4. Don’t leave anything for your kids to divide—especially property. This only creates tension and resentment, particularly if you have a blended family from previous marriages.
5. Do it now.

Now that we’re over 50, there are important things to think about. After losing Gary’s father in 2023, we realized it wouldn’t be fair to expect our kids in Iowa to handle selling a house and all our belongings in Colorado if something happened to us.

We understood the legal battles that would ensue. Even with a will, things can go awry. It’s irresponsible for us to leave such a mess for our kids. So we’re cashing out.

Wrapping It Up

The years we’ve spent here on the ranch were precisely what we needed nine years ago. However, we are not who we were then; we’ve grown, changed, and evolved.

This home no longer serves us or our future. I don’t want to grow stagnant, give myself excuses to stop living, and surround myself with useless trinkets until the day I die, expecting someone else to clean up my mess.

Yes, closing the door on a chapter as beautiful as this one stings a little. It’s not easy to walk away from something you’ve invested your soul into, but learning to let go and trust the process is just another one of those lessons in life.

I Quit My Job, and I Liked It

by Kristina Etter | Apr 2, 2025 | Lifestyle

Returning to work for a few months was a requirement, and it had perks. But I quit my job yesterday; honestly, it was the most relieving thing I’ve done this year.

I’ve spent most of my life working. I started at 12, babysitting. Later that summer, I began “walking beans” for a local farmer. Not my father, mind you. No, my father’s philosophy was, “Of course you can walk beans for us, but you won’t get paid for it – your payment comes in the form of a roof over your head and food in your belly.”

Walking Beans: For those of you who weren’t raised on a midwestern farm, let me explain. Soy beans grow in huge fields in Iowa. Despite all farmers do, weeds inevitability spring up in these fields, and some weeds can destroy bean fields. Back in the early 80s, farmers would hire local kids to walk each row in the bean field and cut out the weeds using a large machete. Generally, you’d get started just after sun-up, around 5:30am and work until Noon to avoid the hot, humid Iowa afternoons. It was grueling work – especially for a 12-year-old.

Consequently, productivity was the only way to gain any amount of respect or praise in my house. As such, I developed workaholic syndrome early in life.

Career Choices: My Path to Freedom

I got my first real job with a time clock and taxes at the age of 14 working for a grocery store in 1988. From that point forward, I worked two, sometimes three jobs at a time. In 36 years I’ve been a…

Some of these jobs were part-time, some full-time, some were short-lived and some I used to build a career. And, throughout all these jobs, I put myself through college and climbed the corporate ladder for nearly 20 years before leaving it all behind to start a freelancing career in 2015. Ironically, I thought I was “semi-retiring” to become a writer.

I can actually laugh now about my excitement for that transition. because Oh how delusional I was… Freelancing was one of the hardest, most demanding jobs I’ve ever had. I spent 16 hours a day hustling, creating, researching, searching for new clients, interviewing, editing, and trying to stay ahead of algorithms and SEO.

So, last July, exhausted from trying to make ends meet as a freelancer, I broke down and went back to work.

Returning to Work – An Eyeopener

Working as a freelancer for nearly eight years, through the pandemic, I got a little spoiled working from home. Therefore, one of my biggest concerns in going back to work was simply: working with people again. The world has changed and I knew this was going to be a completely new environment.

Plus, at 50, I knew the dynamic was going to be much different than it was when I was younger.

Boy, was that an understatement.

I knew, going into this job, that it would be temporary and that I would eventually quit to pursue bigger plans. However, nothing prepared me for what I experienced.

To keep things professional, let’s just say, I’ve never been so excited to quit my job.

It Felt Good to Quit My Job

Granted, the rural area where this business is located is remote. They have one of the worst education systems in the state and the average age for this community is 62. Thus, the talent pool here is more like a mud puddle. But I’ve never in my life worked with so many people who simply didn’t want to work or who were too ignorant to keep a job.

Basically, working with other people is an opportunity for someone else’s lack of responsibility, lack of motivation, and lack of any discernible goals to impact your day. I am thankful for the chance to quit my job again.

However, there was one shining star from my excursion back into the working world – meeting my boss. While I won’t name him, he was one of the most honorable, respectful, ethical men I’ve ever worked for… and that’s a gigantic compliment coming from me. I learned more in 8 months working for this guy than you can imagine and I will always be grateful for that.

Despite how much I enjoyed working for him, it felt good to walk out today. The chaos, the drama, the constant conflict that surrounded that building was toxic. In fact, I believe staying there any longer would’ve likely had a negative impact on my health. I’m looking forward to spending the next two years focused on living, exploring, staying healthy, being active.

I quit my job today, and I liked it.