Our Property in Rio Grande Ranchos (S.Colorado)

We started out early today, guess we were excited to see if you could actually trust property purchased sight unseen on eBay. We spent last night in Denver and started out on our new adventure this morning after grabbing a bite of breakfast at the hotel. We headed south through Colorado Springs. The weather this morning was beautiful and we had wonderful views of Pike's Peak and the Rocky Mountains. When we headed up over La Vita Pass the aspen trees were beautiful shades of light green and bright yellow.

We crossed over the pass into Costilla County the home of our eBay purchase. We drove into the small village of San Luis which is the county seat of Costilla County. What an interesting and quaint little town. Very old with lots of character and Spanish architecture, of course we fell in love with the little town as we often do. Starving by this time we stopped for lunch in San Luis at the La Rosa Mistica Coffee House for a sandwich and ice tea. Food was fabulous, service terrific, atmosphere was in line with the character of the little village.

After lunch we drove through town, by the way San Luis is the oldest town in Colorado, where we found this interesting old General Store and Church.

Proceeding on to find Rancho Whitfield out in the boonies (and we do mean way, way out in the boonies). We relied mainly on Bill's memory (yes we forgot to bring the map,, hush!! no age comments) but we found it after traveling about 22 miles from San Luis (mostly dirt roads after the first 8 miles). On the way we drove through the wide spot in the road of Masita (here we thought it would be a village like San Luis, we were wrong!) Dilapidated buildings and Mexican Chihauhau guarding the road through town! Long story short we finally got to our property, and we were pleased (eBay did us good). The views are phenomenal, the ground is flat and covered with light grass and shrubs. Can't say enough about the views. We would definitely consider this 5 acres as our retirement location with the exception of being too far out in the boonies! We are seriously talking out in the sticks. We may possibly put a small vacation place there sometime in the future. It would definitely be a nice summer location, probably too cold in the winter since it sits at an elevation of 7000+ feet.

Jeremy & Christopher would not believe how close it is to where we used to camp back when they were younger. Probably only about 22 miles out of the town of Antonito. It sure brought back a lot of memories for Tonya as we drove through that little town, there were sure a lot of summers spent there back in the 1980s....

We got to Albuquerque around 5:00 pm (much further to Albuquerque from Denver than we really thought when we booked the trip). After supper at the Cracker Barrel, we did a Wal-Mart run (you can buy liquor in the grocery stores & Wal-Mart in NM, who knew???) and retired to our room (with a cocktail).

Tomorrow we continue our adventure, looking for that piece of property that we want to spend the rest of our lives together on. We will look south tomorrow in the community of Socorro. We have about 4 or 5 pieces of property in that area that we want to look at.

More tomorrow!

Lessons Learned: 1) eBay land purchases, sight unseen, can be a good thing; 2) Check a mileage chart for the distance between point A & point B (387 miles DEN to ABQ) before booking airfare. It would of been easier driving to have flown into ABQ and drove from there.