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Pastimes : NNBM - SI Branch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Clappy who wrote (48663)	12/12/2005 8:20:43 AM
From: Crocodile	Respond to of 104216

Clapper~ Gobble gobble! How cool is that. they are pretty cool. also rather amusing. they wander off as soon as they know there's somebody watching them. made me laugh when i saw them form a very long line stretching out across the field. they don't seem to like to run away... preferring a sort of stately retreat as though they intended to march away and that the fact of my arrival is merely coincidental to their sudden departure. <g> I had seen a real estate ad for some property that I can't even come close to afford, but figured it was good dream material so I went to look at it anyway. sounds like a great piece of property. too bad land prices are becoming so high in that region. however, it sounds like you had a wonderful day and met some very nice people! your story about the land reminds me a little of a piece of land we were looking at almost 2 years ago. Mr. Croc went out to hike around it with the owner and while they were walking around, a River Otter crossed the trail ahead of them. we took that as a good omen. we put a deposit down on the land and the owner was supposed to have it surveyed over the next couple of weeks as part of the deal. however, a few days later, we got a call from the real estate office saying that the owner wouldn't be able to get a survey done and would we still want the land. when he had called a few area surveyors and told them which piece of land it was, all of them quickly replied that it would cost at least $25-30K to do a survey due to the wild geographic features... a lot of huge ravines, a huge rock escarpment, marshes, big crevices, and a couple of old mine shafts. it wasn't really too surprising that the surveyors weren't particularly anxious to do the property -- but we figured the owner would have checked out the price before putting the land for sale. we thought about it a bit and asked if we could get a copy of the deed and land description as we figured -- if we were just using the land to build a summer cabin, maybe we could just do a half-assed survey on our own using the GPS unit and our compass, etc.. turns out that the land hadn't been surveyed for at least a century... probably for the original deed. the description was hilarious and went on for about 8 pages! it said things like == go northeast 3 chains to a rock chiselled with a cross, then turn due east for 5 chains to an iron stake, then north for 9 chains to a large boulder that is split down the middle. the description went on and on like this for pages. Yikes!!! we were just hooting with laughter as we took turns reading parts of it to each other. However, we did take the pages out and found a couple of markers and started walking the property with our compass, GPS and a topo map, etc... however, doing the whole property would have been rather futile. then we got the bright idea to check into a piece of land lying to the north of this one that was also for sale, but owned by a different owner... maybe we could use their survey lines for this property. well, if this could even be possible, the other property had even wilder geography than the piece we had put an offer on. and guess what? no recent survey for it either! <g> there's a lot of land like that around in some parts of the country up here. we checked with the township office and there would have been no problem getting a building permit and putting up a house based just on description of the location of the house in relation to the road frontage and an old railway line along one side. our concern was more of what might happen if we wanted to resell the place some day. also, we have some friends who bought a similar kind of property -- about 400 acres -- and have had no end of problems with logging companies and people staking mining claims who would cut down or bulldoze parts of their forest near the property lines. The perps would plead innocent and say that they thought they were on neighbouring land to which they owned either mineral rights or timber leases. It's all a big headache. so, we ended up canning the deal, but we still hike along the trail that was built on the old railway line. there are a number of large tracts of land for sale all along there and none have been sold despite having been for sale for several years now. if we don't end up moving to the east coast, we may pursue this again and see if we can find a surveyor who could do the work in winter when they aren't usually so busy and the marshes are frozen. someone might be willing to take on the task. anyhow.. yes.. "dream material" is a good thing to have. some people might say we're already living on someone else's dream material.... which helps us to feel good about being right where we are for awhile yet. (o: ~croc