One of the questions people often ask is why we chose to live in a yurt.
Tag: Northern New Mexico
Inspiration
I can’t really say when it was I first discovered Doug Fine, but his story has been a major motivator for this adventure over the years. If you’ve never heard of his book Farewell, My Subaru, I encourage you to become acquainted, and hope you find the same comfort I did in knowing that we all have the power to make our lives what we wish them to be with a little creativity – and a lot of hard work.
Enjoy this short video of the Organic Cowboy’s transition to rural off-grid New Mexico while still enjoying the creature comforts of big city life:
Look out, Enchantment, here we come!!
(And, yes, we really did own a Subaru just like this one… Drove it all the way to FL from CO. Where is she now?)
Introduction
Without visiting in person before making an offer, we discovered the listing for this little gem on the back road to ABQ from Chama.
Criteria met: ≤$1000/acre, Borders National Forest, No HOA or Deed Restrictions. Well, let’s call the realtor and talk about it. Really? That’s all you want for it? Well, winter is coming and we won’t be able to make it out to visit the property so let’s hold off. Maybe not, maybe we can mitigate our risk by giving a lower offer. If he really is ready to sell now he will understand that we aren’t going to pay the full asking price without seeing it. Success!! Property purchased, hopefully this doesn’t backfire on us in a bad bad way.
Wow, just wow our expectations are exceeded. Several miles up an unmaintained road, bordered on one side by national forest and the property on the other three sides are owned by someone that just comes up for a few days each summer, and he was really a nice guy. I think this will work, let’s start planning to get the hell out of Florida!!
Shopping…
We did a bunch of shopping from Florida and had a few good places picked out in the Chama area that we wanted to look at. Unfortunately, you just never know what your gonna get from an online ad. We looked at a few places one piece of property that was pretty flat, had decent irrigation, about 20 acres but it just didn’t suit our fancy. It was open view all around and there were houses on all sides of the border, so even though it was 20 acres there was no privacy. We also looked at a beautiful piece of land that was 5 acres but it was a total cereal bowl—all steep declines leading to a huge open bowl area in the bottom. Well where do you live in this scenario—either on the side of a steep incline or in a flood zone. We really wanted to pull the trigger on that piece of property, thankfully we had a close family member there to talk some sense into us, THANKS TERRY!!. As frustrated as we were that nothing was working out for us, passing on this piece of property was the smartest decision we had made to this point and taught us a valuable lesson. This is the rest of our lives we are talking about, let’s not be hasty!! Time to go back to Florida. Lucky for us we decided to take the back roads back to the airport and just happened to see a bunch of signs for a realtor that we had not talked to yet.
Beautiful view from 5 acres in Chama, but it’s all downhill…
