*This post originally appeared elsewhere on 17 July 2012.

On 6 July 2012, we closed on forty acres of farmland on the Central Coast of California.  Part investment, part retirement plan, part dream, the property is located thirty miles northwest of a town we love, Paso Robles.

What we do with this property is still the stuff of dreams…  Michael dreams of a rustic barn nestled among acres of red wine grapes and his daughter’s wedding day.  I dream of organic vegetables and chickens.  Sometimes cheese made from the milk of a cow I milked by hand.  But who knows what will actually happen?  It’s all so nebulous.  So far away.

I didn’t realize when I married him that Michael was a dreamer…  but now, it’s just another of the things I love and admire about him.  To be fair, it’s also one of the things that terrifies me about him, but that is a discussion for another day.

Last weekend, we visited the property for the first time as official owners.

We had big plans to gain access, build a gate, and clear a nice flat spot for the trailer on a return trip.  As we drove north on the 101 last Saturday morning, I said a silent prayer: Please, Lord, don’t let today be as awful as I fear it will be…

We arrived in Lockwood, population 297, and the site of the property, a little after 9:00am.  As we drove down Martinez (pronounced MART-IN-ez…  By us anyway…) Road to the corner of the property, we were on the lookout for a point of entry.  We drove past the flat, open part of the property into a swale that was larger than we remembered, but no less charming, and we saw the property rise at least a foot above the road into lose, dry soil.

As the road rose up out of the swale toward the eastern corner of the property, the soil melted once again into the road,  and we saw it.

A cattle fence.

Not nearly as nice as the one Michael was planning to build that day, but a cattle fence nonetheless.  Instant access to the property at the exact point we would have built it ourselves.

What would have been the work of the morning, very possibly the entire day, was already done for us.  Relief is the best way to describe what we (read: I…) felt then.

As we pulled onto the property with our trusty jeep and the U-Haul trailer that U-Haul paid us $2.00 to use (that’s another story…) full of fence-building equipment we no longer needed, we began to make our plan.  A slight exploration led us to a nice flat spot on the east side of the swale, over-looking the whole valley.  Then Michael pulled out the mower and made hay while the sun shone while the kids and I explored a little.

Did I mention that I bought Hunter a Little House on the Prairie-style sunbonnet before we left for the property?  It was a big hit, to say the least.  Our property ends where that golden field in the distance begins.  That gold is an actual crop, our land is covered with weeds and dead grass.  And star thistle.  An apparently insidious weed that will take us some time and effort to abate.  I will likely document that process here.

Magnus, possibly the least romantic of us all, was less than impressed with the property.  Let’s just call him ambivalent:

He’ll warm to it eventually… especially when he finds himself spending all of his vacations there.  Ha!