On the Hunt...

July 2025 - We had 11 days to see 60 towns. We needed to see roughly six towns per day...a tall order. We didn't make any lodging reservations ahead of time, we would just find a place at the end of each day. We landed at JFK airport, hopped into our rental car and with a prayer said...began the journey.

The first town we rolled into was New Milford, Connecticut. We were speechless. It was the quintessential New England small town...a lovely Main Street with a town green in the center. Think Gilmore Girls...it even had the gazebo! They are even one of four towns that have a Gilmore Girls Festival! We got out and walked around in awe. It quickly became our #1 choice. This is what we would measure all the other towns against.

A church along the green in the middle of New Milford.

Every day, we began with a prayer...help us to know, help us to feel. We made notes on each town on the spreadsheet, crossed out the definite "no's", ranked the remaining towns and in only six days we had made it to the 53rd town...Newburyport...the very last town to see in Massachusetts.

We drove into Newburyport in the early evening. Bryan's initial thought to himself was..."This could be it" We decided to stop and walk the town. It was if we had stepped back in time...it was absolutely beautiful. As we walked, I stopped and closed my eyes and took a deep breath. The only way I can describe it was as if dew was distilling from my head to my toes...complete peace. We looked at each other - Bryan smiled at me and I said, "I love it."

But, we had seven more towns in New Hampshire to drive through the next day and wanted to do our due diligence. So, we left Newburyport the next morning and drove through New Hampshire...we ended up back in Newburyport that night and stayed for the whole next day.

We walked into a realty office, only the office manager was there. We had a lovely 30 minute conversation with her and she paired us with the perfect real estate agent. We looked at two houses that day. We knew we had lots of time, but wanted to get a feel for what we could afford and the size that we wanted.

As we made our way back to JFK, we stopped in the other four towns that had been our top favorites. It was interesting...those towns that had seemed so amazing just days before...didn't feel quite the same. We loved them and knew that we could be very happy in any of them, but the Lord had shown us where we needed to be.

Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Changes...

For a little while now, we have felt that big life changes were coming. We have tried to follow promptings to do certain things to prepare and we felt impressed that New England was where the Lord wanted us, but we had no idea where. Often, a move is initiated by a job offer or a schooling program and so your criteria are good school districts, commute time, etc. When you aren't moving for either of those things and there are no little ones at home anymore, etc...where do you begin?? What was important to us? What were our goals? Where did He want us?

We knew we wanted to be within an hour of both a Temple and an airport. So, that eliminated Vermont and most of New Hampshire and Maine (we kept the very southeastern areas in). and then we did research and made a list of all the towns we were interested in. Then we went back through that list (again!) and narrowed it down to a minor list of 60 towns in four different states...Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Then, when you have a husband that is a spreadsheet master, you end up with a beautiful heat mapped spreadsheet with all of the cities and your criteria.

For those of you who don't know what a heat map spreadsheet is...don't feel bad...I didn't either

We had done our research, we had a list...now it was time to go see them all in person.