Week starting 11th August – Dahlonega! Time to stop travelling and settle down
Our plans were to move South along the line of the Appalachians to Biltmore House in Ashville (gardens and spectacular house – like a Loire chateau on steroids) before the final push south into Georgia. First stop was Roanoke, on the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains. We drove there on Sunday, and (based upon a recommendation from Keswick Winery in Virginia) we decided to visit a last winery in Virginia called Valhalla. A suitable name – it was at the summit of mountain approached by a near-vertical gravel track – just the sort of thing for a Viking paradise. The views were spectacular, and the red wines were also very good. We spent the night in a very luxurious (but remarkably economical) hotel in the centre of Roanoke, a historic building known to all and sundry as the Roanoke Hotel (though it is now a Hilton). Great restaurant, real “fine dining”. They even lent Lisa a wheelchair for her stay, so the purple monster stayed in the car. The next night was a little less exalted, a typical Best Western and a “county” restaurant in a town called Blowing Rock restaurant.
In Asheville we decided to skip the mansion (at $58 per head for a ticket, it seemed excessively pricey, especially given Lisa’s lack of mobility), but we did at least visit a craft museum on the Blue Ridge Parkway nearby.
And we finally reached Dahlonega on Wednesday 14th August with an appointment arranged to meeting our builder, Bill Adamson, for breakfast on Thursday.
Thursday and Friday were a complete whirl of things to be done all at once, tasks, meetings and some successes. A vast amount of interlocking issues to work through – building a home, temporary accommodation, transport, banks, mail, paperwork, insurance, telephones – the list goes on and on. And it seems that every item has three prerequisites. And of course, unexpected spanners keep getting flung into the works. For example, we went to get some mobile phones to replace our (now very expensive) UK ones. Easy task, you would think. We were halfway through the process when the telephone company ran a credit check on Lisa to see that she was a reputable person. Oh, oh – about 8 years ago, Lisa had followed advice from a consumer affairs guru and frozen her credit reports to stop identity theft. But getting the freeze removed requires a magic 10 digit number. And how many 10 digit numbers can you remember after 8 years? We are still working through unblocking her credit records.
So what did we achieve in these two days? An amazing amount. To identify just a few of the triumphs:
* Bill is all fired up to start putting a roadway into our bit of forest next week (and the bills now start rolling in).
* The local planning office has welcomed us and given us a permit for work to commence
* The local postmistress has given us mail arrived for our new address and agreed to continue holding mail at the Post Office for a while when we can legally put up a mailbox for deliveries
* We found a house to rent for a year from 1st September (thanks to the Estate Agent who sold us our land in the first place). But we can’t really move in until mid September when our furniture and possessions arrive in a 40′ container arrive.
* Lisa arranged a one month rental at a furnished holiday cabin in the woods as a temporary stopgap.
* We purchased two cars, both Toyotas (a Rav4 and a Venza)
* And we also fixed car insurance for the cars, and started on the process of getting health insurance
But still no local mobile phones.
After all that racing about we went down to stay with our friends Karen and Dieter in Villa Rica – a little luxury! No time in the pool, though – since we reached Georgia there has been incredible amounts of rain and it is colder than sunny Ealing. Lisa’s foot continues to be a bit of an encumbrance (more so from the big boot she has to wear until mid-September – and the wheelchair takes up a lot of luggage room in the car).