How it Began

Vacation, 1995.  I had the great fortune to visit the San Juan Mountains in SW Colorado, some of the most rugged mountains in the USA.  Majestic, serene, spiritual and home to a number of quaint old mining towns.  I fell in love when I first laid eyes on the village of Ouray, CO.  The Switzerland of America.   http://www.ouraycolorado.com/   I knew that somehow, sometime I simply had to find a way to live in Ouray.  And I didn't want to wait until I was old enough to retire.  That presented a big problem.  The town survives on tourism for about 3 months in the summer.  It's nearly impossible to earn a sustainable living year round.

Vacation ended and it was back to the madness of the corporate world that was Dallas, where I lived and earned my keep as a software developer.  One hot summer day in 1999, as I was sitting on N. Central Expressway during rush hour (which is more like sitting in a parking lot) spending the 2 hours it took to drive 15 miles to work, something in me snapped.

I had held the vision of living in the magical San Juan Mountains for several years.  Suddenly, that day on N. Central Expressway, the vision of Ouray loomed large.  I didn't know how I was going to make it happen, but I pretty much turned the car around and headed for SW Colorado  (after taking care of a few details, like quitting my job and packing my belongings into a U-Haul truck.)

Call me crazy, but I had spent a lifetime being totally reliable, responsible, providing for my kids, and was always the dependable one.  This was a real risk and completely unlike me.  The only thing I knew for sure was that people weren't meant to live on top of each other in gigantic cities and sit, trapped for hours every day in a vehicle going to and from an unfulfilling job.  Life is just too short.  So off I went and never looked back.