Steps ... A Lot of Steps

The quote is attributed to Lao Tzu. I can’t swear that he said it. Whether he did or not really isn’t the issue. The content of the quote is what’s important.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

It was back in 2006 … not long after we indentured ourselves for 30 years to a mortgage company where this house is concerned … that we got in the car, armed with a folder full of real estate listings that we’d garnered from the internet, and took off on a week-long trip to Arkansas in search for a piece of property that satisfied our interests.

One of the things we learned about listings on the internet … there is often little truth involved where property listings are concerned. Especially when they say … level building site ready for building your dream! We walked on property that you would fall off of if you didn’t carefully watch your step. We drove good roads that forded creeks. One good road took us across a spillway with several inches of water flowing on a “normal” dry weather day.  We looked at a few ideal get away locations in out of the way backwoods areas with neighbors that scared even this Alabama boy.

We really liked North-Central Arkansas and South-Central Missouri. It’s a beautiful area with a lot of really nice people.

It was more to the Northeast though that we found what we were looking for. We made the deal on 5 acres of Arkansas property and smiled all the way back to the Alabama Gulf-Coast.

We hadn’t been back long when a massive tornado ripped through the area where we had bought property. That was a really bad year for tornadoes and we decided that we’d rather not have to deal with the frequency of tornadoes that the area gets hit with. We called the realtor, listed the property, got our money back out of it after a few months, and resumed our search.

It was around 2010 that we drove to North Alabama to meet with a realtor to look at a piece of property that we liked … a nice acreage on Bear Creek. The price was right. Of course, being a realtor, he had to show us a few other properties that we might like. They were not to our liking.

The one that interested us really interested us. It interested us enough that we used the hood of the realtor’s truck to fill out some paperwork and write a check as a deposit on the property.

The realtor called before we got home and told us the seller had accepted our offer. A few days later the official paperwork arrived in the mail. We signed it and returned it to the realtor for the seller’s signature.

Somewhere along the way the seller recanted his verbal agreement and refused to sell the property.

Off we go in 2012 on a trip to the Volunteer State with another folder of listings that we’d looked at on the internet with an appointment to meet with a realtor in one area and another realtor in another area.

The first realtor was a sad disappointment. Typical salesperson. We looked at quite a few properties that day. We did get to look at a nice parcel of land on Wilder Mountain … in the rain. Beautiful place. The biggest problem with it was getting there. Honestly. It was a take your chances on a skinny switchback road with no guardrails kind of place. Beautiful views though. Unless you were going over the side of the mountain in an ice storm.

We drove to Pikeville, TN the next day and met a realtor in the parking lot of McDonalds. A really good guy. More of a I’ll show you around kind of guy than a let me try to sell you something salesperson.

The realtor showed us a couple properties close to town that would have been nice building sites for someone wanting to be close to town. Then he took us for a trip up on the Cumberland Plateau. Another couple of properties along the way that didn’t spark any interest in us. Then one last one.

We didn’t try to dicker even one nickel on the asking price of this hardwood treed, never been lived on, 3 acres on a county maintained gravel road.

Nine miles North of town.

Left on the paved road.

Right where Valley View veers off.

Follow it on up to the top of the plateau and go several miles.

Property on the left.

That is exactly where we would be headed at this point in the adventure had it not been for a conversation that my daughter brought to our house a couple years ago.

It was really more of a one-sided conversation. 

Daughter talking. Us listening.

“Dad, I need to talk to you. Now, I don’t want to hurt your feelings. And I know you and Shirli have your hearts set on moving up there and retiring on your property in Tennessee. But me and Danny have been talking. One day y’all are going to get old and we’re going to have to come up there and haul your butts back down here. So, whatever it is you are planning to do up there in Tennessee, why don’t you just do it on our property down here.”

That’s exactly what we are doing down here at The Cabin On Huckleberry Hill.

A thousand miles?

More like a few thousand.