hello, dear, i hope you are well! i was wondering - how did you come across your beautiful home? i have been wanting to find a place like yours, somewhere private and wild, but everything seems so unattainable. i apologise if this is personal, and feel free to ignore it if you wish! thank you for your time (and your blog, of course!!) :)
I once wrote the story of my quest for a nice piece of land :) I don’t know if it is very helpful to others since so much depends on where you are / what you’re looking for, and my method was just ‘visit lots of places, talk to many real estate agents’. But these road trips are a nice memory to revisit. The other day I saved in a Word document all the emails I sent my friends at the time, it was really fun to re-read them. Here are a few snippets:
“I went to visit another farm on my own, following the real estate agent’s directions. It has been for sale for years and is starting to disappear under giant brambles and weeds; I sat in the middle of the courtyard to have my picnic in front of a silent empty house, with a stray cat observing me from a windowsill. There was a shutter creaking in the wind and a pile of neatly-cut logs under a wheelbarrow. I peered through the window and saw a table and some chairs, a broken clock, and spiderwebs in the sink. Felt like a character in a post-apocalyptic novel exploring the places where people used to live, trying to find a house to shelter in before winter.”
“I got to travel on horseback and it was wonderful! One day I’ll have a horse and we’ll go on adventures together. It was also great not to carry my rucksack for a while; my shoulders wept with gratitude.”
“I never see anybody but cows. It’s amazing. The silence is incredible.”
“I came across a flyer that said a little town nearby was having their yearly book festival this week... You Won't Believe What Happened Next. (To my defence, this flyer was right there on the ground—I almost stepped on it—clearly placed there by God herself.) My rucksack is heavier now.”
“I wasn’t able to find the farm I was supposed to visit today. No mobile network and I was too embarrassed to go back & ask for better directions so I just kept meandering alone in the woods feeling sorry for myself. A gloomy rain started falling very apropos around this time.”
“I visited such a nice early-1800s farmhouse, with a gorgeous climbing rose on the wall, but the roof looked incredibly damaged and roof fixing is the most expensive thing in the universe. [...] Building my tent last night was a sad wet mess and why is Mother Nature so freezing cold in the morning? It’s July! The trees were crying their eyes out all over me as I folded up the tent; then it rained for hours but luckily I found an empty shepherd's shelter—like a troglodyte hole carved in the mountain with just a stone bed inside. Once the clouds cleared up the view from up there was amazing.”
“I made friends with a wild goat!! At first I thought she was thinking “go away, Parisian” because the troglodyte hole was her apartment, but I gave her some stale bread and then she followed me for quite a long time. Goats are simple souls like you. (I realise that in all my goat pictures my nails are suspiciously clean for someone doing wild camping. I swear I am not secretly staying in luxury spa hotels and pretending to be an adventurer. I just clean my hands in every single stream I come across. I imagine I will occasionally have to touch dirt and get my nails dirty when I live on a small farm. I'll worry about it later.)”
“I love crossing a village and then being immediately, intensely alone again. I bought some cheese & bread before leaving and later followed a little downhill path in the forest; had my lunch by one of those volcanic lakes. I threw crumbs to the fish. There were beautiful neon blue dragonflies and it was the quietest place you can imagine. “
“So I had a total of 6 meetings, two of them pretty pointless. I also met the only arsehole in this entire region; a very unhelpful real estate agent who talked to me like he was my dad. The meeting at the Chamber of Commerce went really well; the Chamber of Agriculture in this region was more intimidating, in an austere building that felt like a school. Lots of daunting forms to fill up in which every question requires you to take yourself & your project very seriously. As I was completing them my mum texted me “If an insect flies in your face try not to react like you're being charged by a rhinoceros, people looking to buy agricultural land don’t do that.”
“There was a little gurgling stream near the house I visited and I followed it the rest of the day. At one point I startled a large ragondin (what’s it called in english? dog-sized rats with orange teeth) but (once again) didn’t come across any human beings in this 6-hour walk. Just lots of cows with ringing bells, and some sheep. Birds.”
“I am heading back soon; if I walk fast or hitchhike I should get to [town] on Monday, to catch the first of my two trains back to Paris. I really hoped I would get to see the llamas again before I left but I had the llama lady on the phone and she said most of her llamas are now in their summer pastures. I’m serious about the llama thing, you know. Every time I visit a property with a nice pasture I’m like “I can picture my future llama friend grazing here”
(Now I am the llama lady!)
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