apocalypse « Robin Writes

We left bright and early Sunday morning and drove three hours to the listing agent’s office, then another 30 minutes or less to the first property we had scheduled.

Trust me, NO ONE would be able to find us back there!

We’d actually planned to look at 50 acres, on the back side of a total of 93; the front half had a cabin and a barn, so we started there.

Well.

First, I’ll tell you that I’m usually a glass-half-full kind of gal. Things like “Ooh, a circle driveway!” and “Hey, look, a ‘no trespassing’ sign—bonus! Save money on signage!” may have escaped my lips . . .

This was off a CR, a county road; gravel. And the driveway was decent—circle, remember? The cabin was adorable, but . . .

The pillars were not sunk into concrete; the subfloor was um, rolling, and the two propane tanks were, shall we say, questionable. Now, the owner had been working on this for quite some time, but at some point he gave up and moved to Florida. And no one seems to know when.

The clearing needed some serious mowing, no big deal, and the barn was fairly close to the house, but it had no floor; best we could tell, it was just sitting there, no anchor, nothing.

Hmmm.

My husband thinks, and I agree, that it would be much easier to start from scratch than try to fix everything. We did get some good info on the solar panel and rainwater systems—but again, what kind of shape are they in? It would be a great project, if it comes down to that.

We drove down the road a bit, alongside the rest of the property. Not bad. In fact, the listing agent told us to make a really low-ball offer on the entire thing! So, maybe . . . plus, she was really interested in my books!

Only two wrong turns later, we arrived at the second property of the day and met up with the listing agent. He was great, but damn, he was in good shape—just trotted all over those 32 acres, even climbing that cliff . . .

So this was the cave property—documented, dug a bit by mostly amateurs, and almost inaccessible. But it does have a flat spot for building, which is more than I can say for most of what we’ve seen so far.

We pulled off the CR and parked, then walked down a nice trail “to the cave.” Sort of. We veered off that nice trail when we reached the bluff on the Little Piney River, and started the climb.

It was steep.

And narrow.

Holy crap.

Slid on my butt for one part, only because I made the mistake of looking down . . . down . . . down. Ack!

So we got to the cave, and man, was it huge! My husband loved it, kept trying to drag me down the dark, low-ceilinged, rocky . . . well, you get the idea. Nice to look at it, but nope, not thrilled about going inside. Of course, I might be able to work my way up to that, someday. Maybe.

Once we finished with this part, we had to go back up. Silly us. The agent said there was “flat” straight up, so we thought sure, why not, take the shortest route.

OMG.

Took forever.

But finally—success!

This could work. Maybe. The section is pretty irregular, but does have road frontage, top and bottom; the bottom is just a hundred yards or so, right by the river and bridge. And there’s a nice trail from the road to the building site.

And yeah, it has a cave . . .

Well. We set off Saturday morning with high hopes—would this be “the one?”

Sadly, no.

The description was perfect: gently rolling, stock pond, electric, well, ten acres in pasture. The photos were nice, but a bit perplexing. So, anyway, we drove a couple hours and finally arrived.

Even the gravel road that led into the immediate area was wide, level, fairly smooth. A couple neighbors stopped by while we were talking there with our agent and were very nice, very helpful. But that was after . . .

See, the darn place wasn’t marked. Our agent finally reached the listing agent, who was really snippy and kept telling poor C that “there’s a sign, and just follow the fence and the grapevines!”

No sign, no grapevines; not really much of a fence except for maybe 20 feet—we did finally discover the rest of the fence posts. Still no grapevines, no sign.

I walked all the way to the bottom and back up again; no mean feat, considering most of the property was vertical. The mobile home that was supposed to have been removed? Oh, quite a lot of it was still there, scattered all over the place. I did see the well, and there was electric.

But I’m pretty sure the stock pond and 10 acres of pasture was on the next property over, the one I walked to at the bottom of the hill. Oh, and the online photos we saw? At least three of them were taken THREE MILES AWAY!

Guess we know why it’s been on the market for 413 days . . .

C left for another appointment, and we started home. Then we reconsidered—there was another property we’d been interested in and it was just 45 minutes away, so I called the listing agent. He was very helpful, gave us exact directions, told us to walk around and see what there was to see.

So we’re zipping along, and suddenly up pops a 35 mph sign—what? Damn, hit the brakes! Here was a town . . . sort of. It had a bank. And an auto repair place. A couple homes. It also had two really awesomely cool old stone buildings—right on the edge of the road. I mean, RIGHT THERE. Hence the sign . . .

We got to a gravel road, turned, and kept going a few more miles. I’m guessing that during high rains and in the winter, we might be staying put. Easily found the property; it was kind of a wedge-shaped lot, 25 acres like the first one we saw.

The description said there was a garage, but I knew from the photos that it was more like a shed; that’s okay, no surprises. This, too, had had a mobile home on it that had burned down—and it was fairly well cleaned up. A lot of yuccas and quite a few decorative rocks, landscaping, still remained. Oh, and a deck overlooking the lower part of the property.

And I do mean “lower.” Decently level for a bit, then it dropped. Yikes. And beggar’s lice—oh, my. I was covered from boot to hip; my laces looked like dreadlocks! The worst part, though, was the neighbor. Not that we met them, I’m sure they’re perfectly nice, but we could HEAR them. Mower, power tools, whatever, all the way to the middle of the property, or close to that, we could still hear them. No, thanks.

Back to the drawing board!

However.

In a couple weeks, we’re heading out about three hours—a little farther than we’d planned. There’s this one property, the one I mentioned a while back, with a cave. THIS time, I’m studying topo maps! Besides this one, which, I’ll admit, I immediately thought “this is IT!” when I first found it, there are several others. So it’ll be a two-day jaunt.

Can’t wait!