I do love our mobile lifestyle, but it feels great to have a home base. Especially one with lots of room for our stuff, incredible views, and most importantly … unlimited running water and electricity!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for renewable energy and living off grid. But in the search for our perfect piece of paradise, we realized it just didn’t make sense to invest in a suitable solar array somewhere if we weren’t going to live there year-round. We did however consider a a few awesome off-grid properties …

The best of which was this fully self sufficient compound in the Sand Creek area of Northern Colorado. Which is a good thing, considering it is hours from anywhere and inaccessible year-round without a snowmobile.

The funny thing is, we first noticed this property for sale early in our trip during our first pass through Colorado. Returning to the area, we just had to check it out and see why it was still on the market. The realtor explained that everyone thinks it’s too remote. On the two-hour drive back to Fort Collins, via Wyoming, we agreed.

Since we were already way out there in Sand Creek, we decided to check out other properties.

These included a smelly mobile home with an old generator, and ranged from a remote cabin with no trees, no seclusion and no power, to this sprawling geodesic ranch home. It does have a robust power system, and it also has a huge barn, with a SnowCat inside.

Seeing the SnowCat was when we first started thinking twice about Sand Creek.

The craziest decision we almost made, however, was thinking twice about this incredible piece of property in Badger Creek, CO, just east of Salida.

The terrain was amazing, as was the amount of work needed. Our RV solar system is more powerful than the one cobbled together at this place sometime in the 70s.

We considered vacant land too, where we could boondock for a couple months a year. But when we did the math, we realized we would probably end up with only a well and garage, all for the same price as our new comfy digs.

Another funny thing … a vacant piece of land we really loved is just up the hill from where I’m sitting, in my Dad’s recliner . . .  listening to my stereo, with the lights on . . . without a single worry about my solar system batteries.

The snow has melted in Colorado and our search for Jerry’s property is in full swing. We left Texas, camped in Oklahoma for a few days just to say we had been there, and then moved north to Colorado as quickly as we could. It felt good to be back.

Western Colorado is really our favorite region, but sadly, their real estate prices are completely out of reach for us. So we are focusing our search on the central areas, West of Pueblo from affordable Westcliffe, on up to pricier Red Feather Lakes, just West of Fort Collins. Some of these areas we had briefly been to last year, and others we were familiar with through friends.

Our search began by heading out to Westcliffe, to meet our online friends Lilla and Neal, who own property there. It was so nice to finally meet this Louisiana couple who we suspected we had a lot in common with (i.e., fellow animal lovers, DINKs, free thinkers and dedicated to simple living).

We spent a great weekend together. Lilla and Neal introduced us to their weekend getaway town that they love, spoiled us rotten with their Cajun cooking, and entertained us with their dogs, Nadia, Captain and George. When the gang had to head back to Colorado Springs for the workweek, they graciously offered to let us stay on their property for as long as wanted. What great people!

Since then, we’ve toured three different counties, and have learned a few things about looking for our land:

Much of Colorado’s prettiest rural land is held within subdivisions, most of which have their own set of rules (“covenants”) that dictate what people can and can’t do on their land.

Some make sense for their locations, like, you can’t leave unattended horses on your property, or open a dairy farm.

Other covenants border on fascism, and require minimum square footage sizes for homes, along with architectural plan approvals, supposedly in the name of keeping up property values.

There are also many covenants that prohibit owners from living in their RVs on their own land, even if the subdivsion is mostly vacant, zoned rural and allows for livestock!

“The county doesn’t want us to turn into a giant campground,” one realtor told us.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what we want to do. Get some land, park our RV on it for the summer, build a garage so we can get our remaining stuff out of storage in California, and then head back to warmer climates in the wintertime. Maybe we would build a house on it eventually, maybe not. We want to keep our mobile lifestyle, but have a home base for a few months of the year.

Seems like a logical plan to us, but to a lot of uptight developers, they fear that we’d turn their tidy subdivision into Hooterville. We realize it’s a fine line between having a law of the land through covenants, and not allowing people who don’t respect their neighbors to move on in, but there’s got to be a happy compromise somewhere!

We got a good laugh when we realized that we, trailer living road trippers, are the property owners that a lot of people don’t want next door.