Where Three Roads May Meet

Today was to be Jamul land viewing day.  Unhelpful as usual, the property on Sierra Cielo Lane was listed as 0 Sierro Cielo Lane.  So... no real address and even then, the road name was misspelled.  So we looked at the map view on the site Adam sent to us.  It had the property nestled between two dead ends of Isla Vista Rd.  Ok, we figured that Sierra Cielo was too small to show up, yet, when we looked up Sierra Cielo, it was nowhere near Isla Vista.

Don't think this was a quick find either.  We had to debate if we'd tried to view this land before as recorded in The Invisitable Lands, and if we'd thought it was too far out at the time, and how maybe it was the land with the road that looked like it was going to try to dominate our car and our car would lose.  But then, where this map showed this property didn't look too far out at all and actually it was right around an area of Jamul we like.  Then we had to drag out the property lines map and compare it with the property lines on the map on the website and maybe it was this rectangle?  No... that one couldn't be it because on the app it showed as national forrest land.  Well, but that is where the parcel is on the map on the website.  But no, what about this rectangle here next to the lopsided right triangle with a funky hat shape?  And so on and so forth.

When we did discover that the map showed a site that wasn't the right site... well, we've learned that lesson.  I just told the site I wanted to schedule a showing for next Sunday.  Let the real estate people work out why it shows some weird place.  I don't actually have much faith that we'll get shown the land next Sunday.  Frankly, we're not getting great service in this regard but it's all I can really do right now.

Moving on, there's a whole mess of properties for sale in Jamul in a design that looks rather like the state of Illinois, a state I say looks like a sock with which my cat had its way.  Today, however, I just said it looked like an appendix and left it at that.  (If you're from Illinois, I mean no disrespect.  I'm from NH originally.  A state where they scare all the little kids by teaching them at age seven the state motto: Live Free or Die.  I literally thought I'd have to make that decision some day.  At gun point.  Although, who knows?  I'm only 41; there's still time.)

These properties are situated along three roads, Montiel Truck Trail, Rav Ct, and Lazaroff Ln.  Of course they are all listed at 0 on those streets.  But the good news is that we could see them all at once.  We brought the map view up on the website and there was the site, nestled between two dead ends of Isla Vista Rd.  Wait... Whaaaaaa?

In a feat of great technological and mechanical searching, we cross referenced Montiel Truck Trail with Google Maps and Chris's property lines app and several other roads that showed up near there (Google Maps could not find Rav Ct or Lazaroff Ln) and found the well used appendix shape.  It was definitely not anywhere near Isla Vista.  I wrote Adam a slightly salty note about how the map function showed the same site for two really different properties and was it possible that their map data was fucked.  (No I did not say the F word.  I said I was only slightly salty.  I did, however, think it.)

But with our technological digging, we did find the damaged sock so off we went, hats on our heads, water bottle in hand.  

The way to Montiel Truck Trail takes us 5 miles (8km) down Lose-My-Lunch Lane, aka Lawson Lane.  I was recently talking to a friend about this unappealing street and it became clear that she'd gotten the impression that the road itself is a terrible road.  Like, it's full of potholes or is graded badly.  In case you got that impression too, nothing could be further from the truth!  It's actually paved quite well, which is part of the problem.  You can actually drive fairly well on it!

See? Perfectly well paved

Last night I was explaining to a dear family friend (I'd say an old family friend except then it's difficult to know if I mean the relationship is long lived or the human.  In this case, both would be true, and though I feel that it's not at all insulting to mention how this friend has totally won at life for many years, I dislike ambiguity if I can avoid it.)  right... so, explaining to this friend as how the land down here is all hills.  Well, I mean, if it were really all hill, then it would be one ginormous mesa and that's not true, so the point is that there seems to be a great dearth of flat land and either you are going to build on a hill, on the side of a hill or in a valley (because we are not actually a great mesa).  

So, the deal with Lose-My-Lunch Lane.  It's built largely on the outside and middle of many consecutive hills.  So the curves it makes are tight and many as it outlines the grand hilly ripples.  (Hilly ripples?  Rilly hipples?  Silly nipples?)  The road is narrow with one side flanked by a wall of hill and the other a sheer drop off.  Now, that would potentially bother someone with more of a heights issue than I have, but luckily it doesn't much bother me.  What is bothersome is that the curves not only go in and out, but also up and down.  In addition, there are a few sections of the road that are relatively straight.  So, you're going along at a nice sedate pace because the road is very twisty and you'd prefer to stay on it and not, say, falling through the air to the puff of desert dust 100' below.  You start to go up the hill and so you shift down into second as your car huffs and puffs its way up the curve.  And then, you're making it pretty well, so you shift into third, only to have the road curve the other way and abruptly face downhill very fast.  At this point you can either ride your brakes down the sharp and steep curve, or down shift again while you wrench the wheel around which makes your car pull up slightly.  And I generally down shift because who wants to replace brakes so much?  And then you get to a stretch that is just a bit straighter and you temporarily think that your travails are over so you start going a radical 25mph (40kph), and right then you hit another sneaky sharp curve so you brake quickly and the whole thing repeats itself.  All this back and forth, up and down, go and slow just does a great number on the old tum.  Or at least my tum.  I asked Chris half was down Lose-My-Lunch Lane today how his stomach was faring.  He said it was fine and how was mine.  Side eyeing him I admitted to being slightly upchuck-ous, which was totally unfair since I was driving.

There's not really much to tell you about the appendix land.  We made it to Montiel Truck Trail.  It looked dry and less nice than the section of Lose-My-Lunch Lane off which we'd just turned.  The land was to our right and... well, we couldn't see much of it.  I found a place to pull off and took this pic:

It might look like we could have wandered into that patch there and seen the lay of the land, but no.  It was all deeply buried in under brush the way that snow lays on the Northern landscape particularly after the plow has gone past the sidewalk.  (For those who don't know from snow, plows are a great and necessary nuisance.)

There was a burned out patch a little down a hill.

We thought we'd be able to see the land better from there as we could walk in, but no.  It was dense and impenetrable. 

We noticed with much humbugging that the relatively flat land allowed us to see the many neighbors we'd have and... we just weren't into it.  $150K for land with no pad, no roads into it, no well, and a great likelihood of many years of construction noise to come after we build ours.  Nope, nope, nope.

via GIPHY

So, back we went.  A weekend of land search amounting to nothing much at all and the dog having no great walks or adventures.  On a relatively placid section of Lose-My-Lunch Lane, we slowed to take a picture of this guy:

He was most displeased to see us and set about making it very much impossible for us to proceed lest we crush him and give him to the dog for supper.  He stalked back and forth in front of our bumper, rocking his head in disgust, gobbling and gabbling.  It was great!

He thought we were fowl

*Side note* It's true what the comedians say.  Turkeys look like inside-out vaginas.  Don't misunderstand.  I'm a fan of vaginas... on humans.  But turkeys are dang ugly.  No vagina is supposed to be something's head and neck.  It's no wonder that when Chris decided to start bow hunting, I encouraged us to start with turkeys.  I had in my head that it would somehow be upsetting for Chris to kill an animal, especially for the first time, so I gallantly insisted I go with him.  And I couldn't quite stand the idea of seeing a cute bunny killed or deer, hence, turkeys.  

That particular hunting trip progressed with us getting up, as one does, at 4:30 in the morning, going to where we thought the turkeys would show up, and me sleeping behind our hunting shelter while Chris scratched a turkey call for hours until we gave up.  After that, Chris reminded me that he sadly has to kill mice for his job sometimes and I realized that my fervent hope that I'd witness a modicum of emotional affect in him was misplaced.

Early on in our relationship, Chris said of himself that he had the emotional range of a teaspoon.  Some years later, I assured him that he had reached the range of a German soup spoon -a particular joke between us because he came to the relationship with the biggest friggin' spoons I ever did see and he assured me they were normal for Germany.  This lead him to say that perhaps someday he'd make it to the range of a spork.  Sporks are emotional, says he.  I do believe that the range has expanded lo these many years.  Whether or not we're at the spork range, I'll let him decide. *End side note*

This delay today would have been frustrating if we'd had to be anywhere.  I do remember living in the country and having to wait for the farm geese to cross in front of the car between the farm and their swimming hole.  And the horses that got out and were running amok and you had to be neighborly and get out of the car and help round them up.  And certainly dogs that were never restrained who found passion in life by racing after your car trying to bite your bumper.  But it's been years since any of that happened and we weren't on a schedule today.  We let Butterball strut and pose for a few minutes before I gently eased off the clutch and nudged him until he gave up.