Yep you are dealing with the normal issues of leaving suburbia. The more effort you put into the decision now the more likely you will have a good outcome. Option 3 works as long as you have REALLY narrowed down the area you want to relocate to. No sense buying in one state only to come to find you really wanted to live in another. Renting might also be a better option than buying, as it gives you the ability to more easily move if needed. When you find your ideal property (or at least as close to it as you can) you need to be able to jump NOW. Having to wait until your starter home sells can often mean you miss out.
Depending on available budget (and ability to adjust location to suit it) things can be less stressful as money solves a lot of moving problems. Ability to adjust location can mean that what is out of reach in your more desirable area might be easily doable in another that is a bit further down your list. As I have mentioned it's about what your main priority is and the sacrifices you are willing to make to achieve it. Longer drive for services in exchange for larger plot of land that's in your budget for example.
My wife had originally wanted to go off-grid in Alaska but having been there I shot that down due to costs and remoteness. In our case we were further constrained by trying to keep it under $200K (house and property) as we didn't want a huge mortgage in retirement. So our search took over 3 years and even then it was a compromise, as wife wanted more trees while I wanted more land. Though after seeing the fires in the West this year she has stated that she is glad we didn't move into the forest like she had wanted. If we had $400K to spend we would have had no issues at all finding a nice place in any of the locations we researched.
A friend of mine (lifelong Phoenix resident) recently moved family to the mountains south of us in Eagar. They are renting for a year to decide if they will be able to adjust, after which they will look at buying. And by adjust they mean to small town, weather, elevation, slower lifestyle, things you want not being in stock, etc. ALL of which are vastly different then what they have lived their entire lives in so far. They are currently wrestling with not wanting to be around so many people but needing ready access to medical as they both have issues. They are also an example of what adjusting location could do to help budget, as 40 acres of bare land actually in Eagar is $250K while moving well outside town (but further from services) drops price appreciably.
This is the place we looked at in Yaak, MT. The south fork of the Yaak river was about 25 yards from the back door (house was on high side so no worries about floods). But we decided that only 5 acres wasn't going to cut it. Plus despite its remote location there were people all over and relatively crowded together. Yaak consists of two bar&grills (one with a tiny store and the other had rental cabins), a Forest Service helipad and a skeet range. EVERYTHING else you needed was 50 miles away in Troy or 100+ miles to Kalispell.
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