Unplanned Excursion

Monday morning I slept in.  I realize that, for those of you who know me, that is relative.  I regularly sleep through to 9 or 10am.  I can only say, whether it's my chronic whatever that doctors seem unable to diagnose, depression, or just the sandman, I need a lot of sleep.  Monday, I slept until past 11!

I recently read that one mistake we make in the morning is to look at our phones right away which tends to tell us all the things we need to do.  We receive these messages with some anxiety and thus don't have a relaxed and measured start to our days.  Well, be that as it may, when you get up past 11, you do rather need to get going on things.  I had multiple emails in multiple accounts, multiple Gchat messages, several text messages and I didn't bother checking facebook.  

One email was from Chris who'd dug up some more Jamul properties to look at.  I admit, I didn't look at this email.  I knew I needed to put in a few solid hours of work for the store and also, I need to look for land lot loans.

One of you all had recommended I look at financial institutions that get money from the Rural Development board, which was a great suggestion.  The list for California is pages long.  But once I started actually calling banks (one in OR was called Rogue CU.  I called it just because of the name!), it turns out most of them don't do land loans, only traditional mortgages.  Many of the places I found online had sketchy "Give us your contact info!  All of it!  We'll call you with a quote.  No tax papers necessary!" I admit, I tried one of them.  It did not result in anything useful.

When Chris got home at 1330ish, I was really ready for a break.  He'd gone to check out one of the properties on his way home from work and was really excited.  So, putting aside the loan project and any hope of doing work for the store before night time, we bundled up the dog and some water and went out.

We went past this pink house on the way

On the 45 minute drive to Jamul, we discovered that our car windows no longer roll.  Not up, not down, not locked, not unlocked... Nope, they are done.  Ugh. 

Instead of fret, I put my barely-there Spanish to the test with road signs wondering aloud what "Loma" means and why it's del fuego (not that most things here haven't burned recently).  Chris helpfully looked it up on his phone.  Apparently, Loma means knoll.  I tried to explain what knoll means to Chris, for whom the word was new, but got an attack of "do I really know what that word means or do I just think I know?"  Google helped out again and it turns out, I do have an accurate understanding of the word.

The first property was over 35 acres!  It's difficult to think what you couldn't do with 35 acres.  We fantasized about Chris having room to build a whole archery course, lots of room for the dog to sniff and crap, and the blissful ability to not be near anyone at all!

We did have to go on Lose-My-Lunch Lane for a short time, but quickly we turned onto Beaver Hollow Road.  I must say, while I don't think beavers have lived here for quite some time, and possibly the road name sparked some off-color comments between us, that is the way to name a road!

Beaver Hollow Rd started out paved and became dirt.  Honestly, the dirt part was better than the paved part, if that tells you anything.  I did have a sad run in with a pointy rock that was higher in the road than I thought.  The unfortunate truth is that, were we to buy this property, we'd honestly need a vehicle with higher clearance and maybe newer shocks.  But at least the windows would work.

There was a very serious gate just before this property.  The road was quite narrow so I parked in a bush.  When Chris has been there before he'd be visited by Neighbor Suspicious so we didn't want to irk the guy any more.

It might have been difficult to think what couldn't be done with 35 acres before, but we found something we couldn't do with it.  You can't walk all though it!  The property is abutted by a paved road.  We walked up it until we found a spot to walk onto the property.  And, this spot was pretty flat and somewhat free of bushes.  But too, it's right on the edge of the 35 acres.  I can't help but feel that if we have all that space, it might be nice to go back from the road a bit.  I tried to climb up a small hill to see if it was somewhat flat up there, but ran into this issue again:

And this part was traversable

How do people, especially those who create site maps, figure out where to put the silly house if you can't walk around the property?  Drone?  Someone's got more resources than we have...

We walked on up the paved hill, skirting the many piles of red animal crap (there's something red they're all eating there...), following Chris's parcel lines app to see how far back the land went.  The road crested and the property still continued down the backside of the hill.  There were some amazing knolls (or Loma) on which would have made nice spots for a gazebo if we could build a bridge to get to them.

There's another 35-ish acre lot right behind this one.  As far as we can tell, it's primarily the other side of this mountain.  Literally the slope.  You know, you go to look at land hearing something amazing about it, like that it's 35 acres, and find actually most of it would be so difficult to use you'd be better off with a 0.3 acre parcel of entirely useable land.  

We headed back and spent some more time trying to figure out if we could make much use of these 35 acres.

Here's the part we could walk over and probably build on

The southerly view is nice.  A neighbor has a small vineyard.  The rest is mountain.

In trying to get the lay of the land, the dog got hot and found shade again.  He's good at that.

This path petered out before long

And yes, there was also plenty of this, as usual:

There was another property we wanted to look at.  And it was on the way back from this one!  So, clearly it wouldn't be too big a deal to just stop by it and look?  It couldn't take so long or be so strenuous, right?

The address for this one was 5 Accounty Rd Alta Loma Lane.  Don't bother looking it up on google maps.  We tried.  We tried when we had a terrible signal and when we had a good signal.  There is no Accounty Rd, pretty much anywhere.  So we decided to go to Alta Loma Lane and just drive down it.  

Alta Loma Lane is beautiful and twisty, but not so much as to make you upchuck.  There's a section with an array of oddly muscular looking, dome headed kid signs similar to this one:

Then we got to the end of the road.

But no For Sale sign... We consulted the internet.  It seems that the driveway off to the side there... isn't a drive way!  After doubling back a few times, we headed down in and, guessing at a few forks, found the property in question.

There wasn't room to pull off the road entirely but it was less in a bush

Beyond the sign was a driveway of sorts.  It was quite narrow and hugged a cliff and there were a lot of bushes growing up in it.  We searched for the pad that was said to be "10,000 square feet."  We thought we'd found it when we saw this:

It was really steep down this hill with loose sandy rocks along it.  I fell directly on my arse and have a brilliant bruise as a battle scar.  I'd show you but this isn't that kind of blog.

But this pad had a big fire pit crudely put in the middle of it and, after consulting the property lines app, we found that this wasn't part of the property in question at all.  Walking back, we found what we'd originally overlooked because it was so overgrown.

Someone's been sunning out there

We weren't much taken with the pad itself.  We determined that South was mostly facing the way the pad was and as for 10,000 square feet?  Well, the pad was a little over half the length facing Southerly than what we estimate we'll need.  Ugh.  But we were really very taken with some rocks right in front of the pad.

The view from the rocks was great.  We kept trying to figure out if we could build a switchback road down the hill somewhat to get a bit more space to build.

We really really like this property, but the fact is, the pad is too small, and it's so close to other folks' property as demonstrated by the fire pit just beyond this property's pad.  Sadly, we packed it in and headed back.

Our car windows worked on the way home. (!) 

We rolled in exhausted at 1730h to some really unhappy cats and one take out dinner.