Update on Land Choices

Since my last post about purchasing land, Kelsey and I have taken a few trips out to the Hood River area in Oregon, and fallen in love.  Affordable land seems to be somewhat hard to come by, but not impossible.  More importantly, we've met some folks who seem like they'll turn out to be good community, the scenery is beautiful, and there are job opportunities for Kelsey.

It feels good to be this close to potentially moving to the community in which I'll be buried.  I know that's a slightly morbid way of thinking about it, but it's really important to me to finally put down roots somewhere.  I want to have neighbors whose kids I watch grow up.  I want to have weekly, monthly, or yearly traditions that become a staple of my life.  I want to know the feel and flow of a place like the back of my hand, and I want my potential future kids to get that sense of place as well.  I want to plant a tree knowing that I'll eat its fruits in 5 or 10 years, or that my kids will eat its nuts in 50.  The thought of finding the place I'm going to spend the rest of my life is uplifting to me.

That said, the kind of land that I want that's available in the Gorge is largely out of our price range.  The parcels that are in our price range are not necessarily the quality of land I'd like to start out with, or they have too many restrictions.  So we're probably going to end up buying something smaller to start out with, and a few years down the road we'll purchase a second piece of property that will turn into the main homestead.  We might even, as a placeholder, buy a regular house on a .25 or .5 acre lot, just to have a little space to work with, but not something that would be hard to sell due to my radical plans for larger land.

All in all, I'm looking forward to the coming changes.  I'll update the blog with my progress as land potentials crop up, and certainly with updates when we end up knowing if and when we're moving.  Thanks for reading!