Retirement never meant much until recently. It was always a distant goal planned for and just forgotten about in most cases. It is looming close now, really large and close. It is as I have expected somewhat formidable to think about the journey to this point. Equally daunting is the task ahead. Locating land to purchase, negotiating a reasonable price, securing said real estate then building a facsimile of our existing place. Then we have to market and sell our current place. Enough about that...
Our hope is to be as close to self sustaining as possible, we have gardened for 20 years and have refined our skills and techniques in that time. We will now be in a place with basically no water, relying on rain catchment and long term water storage. This will in itself be a radical shift in our habits and methods, moving from a water well capable of 80+ gallon per minute mean flow to how much can we catch and store?
Further, we know how to survey land types and build safely on each type here, we also know the types which are prohibitively expensive to build on, like swamp and seaside. In the desert we will have our own new learning curve, dry washes, silt, sand, clay, rock and so on. We will have to choose carefully with regard to our needs. While we are not in a rush, we don't want to dally in the transition either. We need a place big enough for a farm, rabbits, chickens, goats maybe, and the garden. Then enough buffer to keep us happily separated from our neighbors. When we bought our place 20 years ago, even being twice the size of where I was raised it is simply just not big enough. Plain and simple,we need more room. The trick is to find our perfect place. That is really the root of the matter, the perfect place.
Enough of this for now, this blog is really intended to be a story line to follow our progress through retirement and relocation to and through the buying, building, selling process. Stick around, hopefully I can keep it entertaining...
