Arkansas part 1

Your moving where? Why? That's the two questions we tend to get when we tell people we've bought land in Arkansas. I can't blame them, when we first started planning our homestead, Arkansas wasn't anywhere in our plans. We considered Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, we even considered Montana and north Idaho, but not Arkansas. I hardly knew the state existed! Then one year we wanted to take a vacation somewhere different then our normal trips to the east coast mountain ranges and an ad for Arkansas caught my attention. That year we went to the Ouchita (pronounced Washita) mountains near Paris, Arkansas. We stayed in a cute little cabin on someones farm and set off to explore this new land. We visited Magazine mountain and Devils Den, we explored more caves then I had ever seen before. There were beautiful, clear, cool lakes, creeks, drop offs that were down right scary and yet it was a little reminiscent of Florida where we currently lived. Even though it was very hot when we visited, the state was in a drought and I was attacked by some angry ground bees on one of our hikes, somehow I fell in love with the wildness and peaceful feeling that place gave me. My husband felt the same. After that I started researching properties in Arkansas and that's when I came across Mountain Home. Lakes, waterfalls, rivers, close to buffalo national park. It seemed like the perfect place to look and so we planned our next vacation to look at land there the very next year.
. I believe God opens doors when your willing to step out in faith and that is just what he did for us. We went up to look without enough money to buy a piece of land, we didn't even have the 50% down most banks required for land purchase. We figured we would just get an idea of what was available and go from there. The Realtors were probably the least helpful and least friendly I've ever came across anywhere, they handed us a list of properties for sale with some general directions and sent us on our way. We drove everywhere it seemed and saw some very beautiful country side. On a trips to look at a one of these properties another piece caught our eye, it was a beautiful field of lush, green grass with a for sale sign from a land company. We had a list of wants for our land, it had to be at least 1/2 pasture, it had to have some flat land to build on, it needed to be wide so we were not within spitting distance of our neighbors and we wanted a water source. This property had everything except the water source! We knew land companies were often more expensive with high interest rates and ridiculous terms, so we took down the number but did not call them at first. We kept looking...