Ramona Review

I might have fallen asleep around 4am last night.  It could have been 3:30.  Either way, my smart body detected its usual wake up time at 10:10am (because underemployment) and cut me off like a retailer 10 minutes past closing time, approaching a giggling group of students waffling over a refrigerator magnet of a drunk dude face down in a urinal for $2.99.

My anxiety took me right to the computer to look up many real estate things, new potential properties, addresses for properties to visit today, specific details of the Alpine property...  I'm not sure why I've been so anxious today.  Lack of sleep plus fear that I wrote about last night certainly suggests itself, but really does any of that make sense?  Do I need to be so worked up?  I didn't think so either.

Despite the logic in it, I still spent the morning and much of the afternoon, with the cognitive dissonance of having all the energy to run around freaking out but then fall down of exhaustion.  Rather like this unfortunate robot.

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Chris and I set off after he napped.

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Today I recommended we start the GPS right away even though we *know* how to get to Ramona.  Off we went to 1113 San Vicente View.  This land was touted as having almost 20 acres, backing onto BLM land (I wish that meant Black Lives Matter, but actually it's Bureau of Land Management), and a vineyard on the other side.  Seriously, it sounded like a great opportunity for peace and quiet, which we really want.  

On the way we did run into the omnipresent "NO!  STOP!  DON'T GO HERE!" sign.

But in a shady way, we found another route through someone else's recently built upon property... It didn't look like it was being lived in yet.  Then we started down a dusty dirt road.  We saw these big bumps in the road upon which Chris had a mini trauma attack and insisted we shouldn't go any further.  But I said they just looked like ... really big speed bumps so we went on. 

You see that bump?

We did come up along the land.  It was advertised as having level land, slope, valley, and a partridge in a pear tree.  The dirt road ran up along some power lines so when I got out of the car I got all woogley as power lines tend to make me and tumbled gently into the car.  

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The land was beautiful and totally not developed at all.  Which you'd think would be a good thing, but honestly, we just wanted to figure out how to cross the massive chasm of this land to see how much of a flat area lay on the other side.  Because there was no telling from where we were and definitely no building on where we were standing on the edge of basically a precipice, power line effect or no.

Just beyond the dry grasses the land cuts out and leads to a really steep valley

We liked this land, but for $175K, we just didn't think we'd have the money left to build the road and pad we'd need.  Unless... wait, the map shows a passage behind this land... and those other homes... how do those people get home?  We looked through Chris's app that lets him see property boundaries and compared it with GPS and ... maybe we could get to the other side!

We drove on around behind the winery amongst many horses and farms but alas, there was no connection to the path we saw unless we wanted to trespass all over the winery from the original side we were on.  Boo.

Moving along, there were some properties listed on Mahogany Ranch Rd.  It was one of those situations where the actual address wasn't given, but then upon further searching, some addresses were given, but some were sold... Very confusing.  Let's just drive down that road, shall we?

Getting to Mahogany Ranch Rd is absolutely beautiful!  Old, twisty trees offering shade, bizarrely blindfolded horses, and another winery.  The homes on this road might be a little too ostentatious for our taste, indicating that possibly we wouldn't get along as well with neighbors as hoped, but we want to avoid people by and large anyway.  We drove until we saw this realty sign:

So we pulled over and waded into the somewhat passable brush, dog leading the way.  After jumping a few runoff trenches and climbing some flat-ish rocks, we got a lovely view of more rocks, hills, and valleys.  The tricky bit about this land is that you'd have to build a fairly long driveway to reach flat enough land to build on.  And that land is definitely not cleared at all.

 

I get how this land probably doesn't look much different than anything else I've posted.  In fact, the pictures might even make it look worse, but y'all, this is the first land I really want!

The dog got really hot so he found shade wherever we went and hid in it.  He was really tired from his 4 mile Sunday morning Mission Trails hike with Chris.  Yes, we gave him plenty of water.

Can you find the dog?

When we got back to the car we looked at Chris's property lines app to see if we could figure out the address.  It said 18576 Mahogany Ranch Rd was the billing address. I went to write that on my pad of paper and saw it was already written down... as the address on this road that'd already sold!  We drove the rest of the road but didn't see anymore signs.

When we got home, I sent off an email to Adam who's thankfully taken on the job of finding out if that land is really sold, and if we were actually looking at the right address in Alpine yesterday.  

I'm still really anxious but also really hungry so I started to make dinner heating up the oven to bake some chicken wings.  10 minutes in, Chris and I hear an ominous POP!  Then another.  Then a weird rattling noise.  

I ran to the oven and jerked out the now roasted bag of cat food I'd stored in there yesterday.  Chris went to buy animal foods Friday but he accidentally bought the wrong cat food.  We had to store it well away from our jerk cat who was about to gnaw it open when we left Saturday, so I stuck it in the oven.  Seriously, Munchy gets into everything.  We have about 5 rubber bands holding the doors to the cabinets closed because he will find a way in and then he will sit on the dog food and much on it forever more.  I guess we're not returning this bag of cat food!