Moving to Montana

Gosh this journey has been such a long time in the making.

It is July of 2022 – and we are really doing it. We are moving to Montana! In fact, most of our herd is already there, waiting for us to join them and our renters have moved out of our house which means we can actually move in. How surreal!

Kelly and I met via Instagram and started dating in 2018. We hadn’t been dating very long when I took him ‘home’ to Montana for the first time and I got to watch him fall in love with the mountain valley I grew up in.

Then it was 2019 and my Dad made the decision to sell the farm I grew up on and downsize to a smaller property in the same area. It was really difficult to not be in a position to buy the farm from him.

We began talking earnestly about eventually moving to Montana. We thought the location would be a prime spot to raise horses and go riding and live the lifestyle we were fighting tooth and nail to live in Washington. But we knew we would make less money at town jobs in Montana, so we needed to make sure we were in a financial position that could sustain such a move. This meant that we wouldn’t be able to make the move for at least a couple of years.

In November of 2020, we took a huge leap of faith in chasing our dreams and we made an offer on a piece of property in Montana, and our offer was accepted. It was a complete whirlwind at first, agreeing to purchase a place Kelly had never even seen in real life.

And then the whirlwind slowed down again, because it was ours but we still weren’t financially ready to move. So we rented our house out and settled for drive by visits for a year and a half.

Fast forward to May of 2022 and it was time to start getting the property ready for our horses.

We put up one cross-fence to start with, then we moved a group of horses over at the end of May.

Pretty soon we were making trips almost every weekend, hauling stuff, hauling horses, working on fence.

But, to me, the thought of actually moving still seemed so surreal.

And now, here we are. Planning our actual move to Montana.

We have wanted this for so long and worked so hard, and I can’t wait to be able to wake up there and go to sleep there and watch all of our animals thrive there.

And I pray we thrive there, too.