I’m going back a little to 2014 when we got the spark to change our lives, to become more self-sufficient, to cut our materialistic tendencies, and perhaps to become happier.

We’re an average family. I have four terrific daughters, two of whom are still at home. The older girls got cheated a bit. There were fewer vacations, less play time, and not much emphasis on Hawaii. My bad.

In my case, Dad was in the Navy, and we lived all over, but my earliest memories started in kindergarten when I spent time at Waikiki Beach. I couldn’t swim yet, but my sister Cathy and I had a blast.

The Island of Oahu wasn’t as crowded back then, and it’s still beautiful, so Cathy settled into a life in Honolulu in the late 1980s; Mom and Dad moved to Kalaheo on the island of Kauai about the same time. I graduated from High School (Las Lomas) in Walnut Creek, CA, and played some basketball in college, but it seems I spent more time playing poker and blackjack than studying. I wound up at the University of Reno, Nevada, in the 1990s and met my wife, Shannon, while working at the Atlantis Casino Resort. I was also writing a book, Nevada’s Golden Age of Gambling.

The book sold well, so I wrote a novel, Stealing From Bandits, and quit casinos for a year. Golden Age outsold Stealing ten to one, and I learned that making a living by writing books is tough. I supplemented my book income with magazine articles, web articles, and poker playing.

Shannon and I had college degrees, but she wanted to further her education with a degree in naturopathic medicine, so we got serious about making more money and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. Shannon studied (I might have helped and learned a little), and we worked at Casino Arizona, and vacationed regularly in Hawaii, visiting the family. And then came 2014.

Well, what to do. How do you quit the rat-race and live naturally, happily ever after? We started looking at raw land. We were raw. We had no clue. What to do?