When you're out by Plowden Road in Sumter County, there are only a few sounds you'll hear on occasion.
A braying donkey, mooing cows, barking dogs and the occasional roar of an F-16 at Shaw Air Force Base 20 minutes away.
It's mostly quiet and flat out there. And that's why Gary and Debra Fisher purchased their forever home there after moving from Pennsylvania.
They met over Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola more than two decades ago, they said. They're both used to that rural farm life, and they know how to have fun. Thoughts of riding in the truck bed and dancing at country bars line their memories. And now the two have commemorated this new chapter in their lives in their new home with a street name change.
"We have no plans of going anywhere," Gary said. "I'm going to die here."
Sumter County Planning Commission approved a street name change for Tyler Lane to become Beachdreamin Road back in July. This was the first street name change in the area in eight years. The new name has ties to the Fishers' son and their animals.
Beachdreamin is their son's cattle's surname. When you get cattle, you have to register them with the name of their farm or where they'll live, and it kind of acts as a family name would. So their cow, Bahama, has the full name Beachdreamin Bahama.
"And when we are gone," Debra said, "this will be our son's, and that is just a way to carry that name on."
The Fishers' home, their Sumter home that they have chosen as their final home and the home that they will pass on to their son, sits on just about 40 acres. They have white rocking chairs on the front porch and a long gravel driveway that the weather finds easy to beat up and leave divots in.
The driveway is one of those classic Southern scenes. Trees line each side, and their branches lean over the beaten path, making sort of a leafy tunnel with light dripping through.
And when the Fishers walk through that tunnel toward their mailbox and new street sign, their cow, Bahama, is able to follow them a good bit of the way, as her pasture juts up against those trees.
It's what drew them to the house, that tunnel. Debra just found the place on Zillow, and after visiting the property and learning about Sumter, they knew it would be home. And they wasted no time making it a home.
The Fishers are fast-moving people attempting a slow life but not successfully, they said, laughing.
They're both nurses who work long hours taking care of two-legged folk, only to come home and have to take care of dozens of four-legged folk.
So in that "get 'er done" way of living, right after the Fishers got the keys to their Sumter house, they got to work making it their own.
"Twenty minutes after we got the keys, and I mean 20 minutes after we got the keys, I knocked out a wall in the living room because there was no light in the living room," Debra said.
The two have more projects to do between nursing and farming shifts, but they'll get it done, and they'll banter the whole way in that loving, sarcastic kind of way. And they say they have everything they need close by, which makes it all worth it.
GPS says it's 11 minutes from downtown Sumter. That's 11 minutes from the Sumter Opera House, coffee shops, clothing boutiques, restaurants and more.
"But do you hear that? Nothing," Gary said. "We're just outside of town, yet you could hear a pin drop in high grass 100 yards away."
"Yeah, we're definitely where we needed to move to," Debra said. "You know Sumter has its good points and bad points, but every town does."
"And it's convenient," Gary said. "There's nowhere you need to go that you can't be at in about two hours or less from Sumter."
Charlotte, Myrtle Beach and Savannah are all less than three hours from the Fishers' country home.
It was relatively easy for the Fishers to contact county officials and change their street name, as they are the only people who live on it, but for other locals interested in changing their street name, they have to get the signatures of any other residents on the road.
"We definitely started something because we got our neighbors down the road considering doing the same thing," Gary said.
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