Throughout the turmoil of the past four years, through the losses of jobs and homes and security and peace of mind, we did manage to cling to one little luxury... our cabin in the woods.
Actually, "cling to" might not be the right phrase; we couldn't unload it even if we wanted to (which we don't). Bought at the height of the real estate bubble in 2007, it's so far underwater it might as well be next door to the Lost City of Atlantis. Selling it wasn't an option and at the depths of our despair we considered just giving it back to the bank, although I'm not so sure what they would have thought about the matter. Having already lost one house in a short sale, I can't imagine they'd be too pleased with me losing two. I imagined they would want to make an example of me and I pictured being hauled off in the dead of the night to some Citibank Gitmo. So we hung onto it, through thick and thin. Mostly thin.
How we came to own it was somewhat circuitous. Long before I met the boyfriend back in 2002, I'd pretty much lost any sense of wanderlust. Too many unfortunate trips with regrettable friends, too many bumped, cancelled or diverted flights and missed connections, too many lost bags. And then there was the weather; the best predictor of freakish weather was just to check my travel plans. Heat waves, hurricanes, swamp like humidity in places they normally don't occur. The one constant, no matter where in the world I traveled, was some local explaining that "the weather is NEVER like this." And finally, there was my knack for always being seated next to the sickest person on the return flight, guaranteeing the one souvenir I brought back from every trip I took was a week long bout with the flu.
That's not to say the boyfriend and I didn't travel, we did. But it was always short weekend trips to Vegas or the desert, somewhere we could DRIVE. When the dogs came around they introduced a new wrinkle... boarding. In theory we could have had someone house sit them, but the friends we had at the time were horrible, the type of people who would rifle through your drawers and closets, hack into your computer and inevitably throw some little get together that would spiral out of control and involve the authorities. And the odds were great that at least one of the dogs would go missing, which would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
Everything pretty much came to a head during the "Alaska Cruise To Hell" of 2005, a nightmarish experience combining the worst of both air and sea travel. As if every conceivable disaster hadn't already befallen us, once we entered cell range somewhere outside Ketchikan, my phone rang with news from the boarder. Turns out our dogs don't play well with others and had been "quarantined". "Actually" said the frightened sounding girl on the phone, "is there any way you could come and take them away?" It took the dogs weeks to recover. And us too.
That was pretty much the end of our travels.
But still, you want to get away from time to time, so what to do? The boyfriend hit on a novel idea... camping. No one would ever peg us as "campers". And they'd be right. But the idea of camping appealed to us because it would allow us to get out of town with the dogs in tow.
The boyfriend found a 1984 VW campervan on eBay.
It had obviously been used a lot, but it was well taken care of and maintained. It was bright metallic copper. It if was a person we pictured a 50something redhead, seated at a bar, hard and worn. We imagined her name was "Karen", so that's what we named the van. It only took two trips in Karen to realize we had miscalculated. Less than a year after we bought her, the boyfriend put her back up on eBay and we sold her to a brutish looking lesbian from Vancouver.
So now it was 2007 and we found ourselves with a little money to invest. I'd watched my 401k languish and always considered the stock market a casino where the odds were always stacked against you. We decided we would invest in real estate. You could NEVER go wrong investing in real estate, right? It would be a twofer - it would be an investment property AND a weekend getaway.
A place at the beach was way out of our league, but perhaps something in Palm Springs or Big Bear? At the time, places there had already skyrocketed out of our price range. And the prospect of a four or five hour drive in rush hour traffic dampened the enthusiasm. So the dream was put on hold.
Since the boyfriend couldn't have a weekend getaway, he decided he would get the next best thing... a tanning bed. This was just days before tanning beds were revealed to be nothing more than cancer causing death machines. He found one on eBay and won the bidding and then the question became how to ship it. It's not exactly the type of thing UPS delivers. "Why don't you just come up and get it?" said the seller. Turns out, he lived in a small mountain community north of LA we had never heard of. "Bring a 4 wheel drive" he said, "there's snow on the ground".
We borrowed a truck and schlepped up the 5 and then off into the Los Padres Forest. By the time we reached the village we were already smitten. We found the seller's house, but he wasn't home. He had thoughtfully left the tanning bed in pieces in the snow. We loaded up the truck and headed back out of town and as we passed a real estate office, the boyfriend made a sharp turn into the lot. He didn't even have to ask since I was thinking the same thing. We ended up looking at just one home and instantly fell in love. Not wanting to be rash, we thought we should sleep on it. And we did. We drove back up the next day and put an offer on it.
And here we are. Literally, here we are... we drove up yesterday to spend the holiday weekend.
And glorious it is, our little refuge. I'm so glad we didn't lose it. I think it's the only thing that's kept us sane these past four years.
