Shady Acres

After spending hours in downtown, we headed to our property to show Maddox. Yes, "our property." This whole time we were going through the process with the land, we always referred to it as ours. I don't think it was intentional but it's another instance of the Law of Attraction in action. Maddox fell under Bowman's spell as soon as he saw the rolling pastures and town square by the way. 

As we pull onto the dirt road that leads to the property we have deemed "Shady Acres" (more on that name later,) we're excitedly talking about our future weekend plans of opening shops and camping. Homeschooling and online school comes up. Wait, back up, aren't we missing something here? Oh yeah, work...and our daughter! While I have the ability to work from anywhere with my job, T.J. has a job that he loves (most of the time at least.) He loves teaching and he's been with Eaton for years now. Ok, so, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves here. 

Now, where the name "Shady Acres" starts to make sense. We pull into the driveway path of the vacant property in front of ours and do a little off-roading while T.J. cringes about his pretty red Jeep getting scratched. There's currently no way to access our property without cutting through another to get back there. (Shady) Luckily, it's all owned by the same company (who sucks at communication - shady) and the only occupant is a lonely overgrown single wide trailer. Once you reach the clearing for the power lines, you can either go right towards the three acre lot, or left, to the one acre where our future home site will be and my favorite tree.  

  

We have a neighbor to the right and in front that has a compound of a bunch of old camping trailers. We're always a little nervous to park over there. We've tried introducing ourselves (well, T.J. has) but we've never seen a soul there except some dogs. (Shady) That path is too narrow to drive down and has apparently been a popular dumping grounds for old tires. (Shady)  We head to the left and follow the path along the pasture to get to the future home site. We get out and show Maddox around and start walking the paths which are everywhere. Someone has obviously using the land for a hangout and deer hunting because there's a collection on Natty Lights and a few deer stands and the paths that were created by someone. (Shady) 

We take Maddox down to the creek and we can hear the rooster I've named Rudy. This is the first

time we've seen the creek ourselves, besides on the satellite, because we never found it last time. It's much bigger than I thought and we actually have about a quarter acre of pasture leading up to it. T.J. is stomping around like crazy thinking he'll scare away any snakes. Scaredy cat. We desperately need to weed whack this area and have some sort of seating area to enjoy the sound of Butler Creek that feeds into the Broad River. Speaking of the Broad River, there is a cool place down the road that is called "The Sandbar" that has cabins, zip lining, and camping in the middle of the river. It's on our to-do list of things to check out. On the big parcel of land, T.J. wants to build tree-houses that we can rent out! He's been watching a ton of YouTube videos on how to build them and is so proud of all the knots he's learned to tie. 

Now that we've been in Bowman all day, it's time to head home and fill Addie in on our exciting news! Spoiler alert: she's not thrilled...