Day 22

On the trail of a new domicile. We spent the day driving around the area between here and New Braunfels (about 25 miles to the northeast). We drove to 14 different properties and covered about 150 miles. The idea was to get an idea of where they actually were and their surroundings. We've found that this gives info that you just can't get online. For example, one house that looked good online turned out to have high tension transmission lines running over the property. Somehow the realtor had neglected to take a picture of them when making up the online property description.

Other places were just too far away from civilization. Because we are pretty unfamiliar with the area we don't know this until we drive to a place. A property might have other problems like too much noise, a badly positioned house, or a lot that doesn't appeal to us. We saw a couple that had access problems. One was at the end of a mile long dirt road. Another was a half mile in on a one lane road with no turnouts. The road serviced several properties. Still another had a "driveway" that we would never be able to get a trailer down. None of these things can be determined by looking at the online description.

All of this driving serves another purpose. It allows us to zero in on properties that we actually might be interested enough in to spend a realtor's time to view the property.

The good news is that we found three or four "we want to look at these" properties. We also found some "maybe if nothing else works out" candidates. Not a bad day's work.

Tomorrow we'll do it again. This time we'll go a little closer to Austin. Might stop at Cabela's if we get a chance.

Saw an advertisement today for a property that looked really nice. A newer four bedroom house on 5 acres. It even had a pool (a negative for us). The price was $319K. We could probably get it for less. The catch is that the property taxes were over $9K. Unbelievable.

It's interesting to note that we've been gone from Oregon for three weeks now. It seems like it's been a lot longer than that.