My husband and I had become restless.

We dreamed of early retirement and quiet adventure, but most of all we craved something different. We tried on different futures. We tried RVing. We took an introduction to sailing course on Lake Michigan one weekend and even went looking at sailboats. We took a vacation to Marquette, MI and thought that might be our retirement spot.

We started searching for properties in the Upper Peninsula but never found “the right one.” Our search moved gradually south, into Wisconsin. That’s how it started.

We were so committed, we put our house in the Chicago suburbs on the market with the idea we’d sell while the market was good and make ourselves more mobile. In about a month we had an offer with no new place to live. My husband toured apartment complexes, thinking we’d have a bridge year. True story, we were one weekend away from signing a one-year lease when an intriguing property came up in my feed. It was in the southwestern part of Wisconsin, in the Driftless Area. With an appointment to sign an apartment lease looming, we leaped into action.

I found a realtor and took a half day on a Monday. My husband and I drove up for a six o’clock showing. We walked in the door and went our separate ways. Five minutes later we passed each other in the hall. The owner was home so my husband spoke in a whisper.

“What do you think?” His eyes were so hopeful.

I broke into a small smile. “I love it.”

We drove back home that night and made an offer the very next day. We had that showing in the last week of August. We closed in the third week of September. Timing was an issue as we had agreed to a closing date for selling our home that was ten days before buying our new home. True story, my husband leased the last storage locker available at a spot close to our house and we moved our things in. Another true story, the town picked exactly that week to redo the curbs on our street. We couldn’t use our driveway and had to build a sandbag bridge to carry boxes and furniture to the moving van. The first closing went fine, and we holed up in a hotel room for ten days. It was touch and go, but our marriage survived.

Yet another true story, we’re in our fifties and did all the moving ourselves. When the day came, we checked out before dawn to drive a 26-foot U-Haul to the storage unit, packed it up in under three hours like Tetris masters, hitched a car trailer to the back, and set off. My husband had five white-knuckled hours of driving while I followed in the pickup truck we bought the week before to carry the dregs. We had permission to park the U-Haul at the new house overnight. We hit a hotel and closed the next day.

We look back on those crazy weeks now with a sense of accomplishment, ignoring how incredibly stressful it all was. We did it. We’re here. And with views like this from our front porch and the quiet discoveries I post about on Driftless Thursdays, we’re never leaving.