So it turns out my sweetie is pursuing this goal a bit avidly, off in hot pursuit of a job. Meaning something he must show up for wearing a suit and tie, elsewhere.

We are in phone communication, and he tells me he is pretty certain we will have to move.

This puts a bit of a damper on the wedding business. It’s slow right now, but I’ve been hoping to see it grow. I’m not easily daunted, so have been trying to figure out how best to re-organize our living situation to deal with this.

Which quite naturally means I am looking at what it would cost us to live somewhere else. When you live in the middle of the ocean, somewhere else can turn out to be just about anywhere on the mainland within easy reach of an airport.

All that now having been laid out, here is what I am finding. This whole lead up has been for me to wonder how realtors overall manage to keep their clients. I am doing what tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people do – searching online for a possible place to live. So what do I want to see in this search?

There are four pictures that pop up on realtor.com right away of each listing. I’d like to see the front of the house, the yard, the kitchen, and the living room. Every time. If I like those rooms, I will be hoping to like the rest of the house, and if I don’t like the rest of the house, but I liked the first four, I can probably make do. So what do realtors do?

They take photos of the house as if the house had vanity issues. Cut off the sides or the walk up and show just the front door. Like that tells me something? They use those big wide angle lenses to take photos of the bedroom to make it look really big but publish the real size, so you can figure out 10X11 is not so big. But when it comes to the back yard, all I get to see is a snippet. Or the first four pictures are all of the same thing- the house from the street, from three different angles, because one shot is a duplicate. They show me the kitchen but leave out the stove. All I see is a big black or white refrigerator poking way out of the built ins, as if it’s trying to walk out and follow its previous owners to wherever they went.

And my most favorite. Picture the swimming pool, blue hole, fake desert rock rim, with a gazebo perched on the edge like it wants to swim but is waiting for someone to say whether the water’s warm enough. And protruding from it in a belching cascade is more fake desert rock. The rock is reaching down into the pool, gonna test those waters and let the gazebo know. The rock being as it were the interior of the gazebo, the effect is ebola like. I went back to that picture at least three times to make sure I was seeing what I just described to you.

OK, that was not the realtor’s fault.

But this is. The realtor came and took photos while the people were moving out. Boxes are everywhere. The kitchen island is stacked with plants. She got three shots of that. I guess if she’d gotten there any later, the moving van would have blocked the view of the front of the house, and she would have let us see that too. The house has been on the market 52 days. Busy lady, eh?

I expected that in searching five markets, all adjacent to different airports, that prices would be all over the map, with the Bay Area being the highest. I was wrong. It turns out that $400K to $500K will get you a very nice home in almost any region. Not any neighborhood, but close to any airport from where I can easily return to the middle of the ocean. I’m not saying that’s my budget, or that will work for us. It is what it is.

What does all this have to do with a European adventure? If upending our life does not produce at least one trip to Paris and Barcelona, then why bother? 2 years ago

Here is my vision: the irresistible wedding venue becomes ever more popular as runaway couples stumble upon it, hear of it through friends and facebook, see it appear in write-ups and on the web.

People book their weddings, and as they do so, it becomes clear that we must set aside time for ourselves and at long last can actually book this adventure.

I am thinking fall of 2011. Bookings for weddings lined up like chessmen on a board all across the beginning of 2011, a lull in the action at the end of summer, and a surge again as winter drops its chill on the northern regions.

And more – I hope we are able to trade days in our honeymoon cottage for days in European chalet rooms, houseboat stays, and so on. We are registered now on a website for that. I must visit that site more to see how to use it to create lovely vacations on a barter basis. 2 years ago