Scouting

No, my devoted Cake Eater readers, I'm not talking about the imminent return of pitchers and catchers.  I'm talking about scouting real estate.

Now that I've got some spare time on my hands, and the weather is warm enough down here in Austin, I reverted to one of my favorite hobbies while I'm down here: looking at lake houses that I will never be able to afford unless I win the Powerball.  I'm currently staying with my sister and her husband in this suburb of Austin.  Lakeway wasn't a suburb when I started visiting down here, lo those many years ago; it was a vacation community on the shores of Lake Travis, that was home to a lot of retirees who drove around the place in golf carts.  But, now, with Austin's phenomenal growth of the past twenty years or so, it has become a suburb.  Where there was only vacant scrub land, there is now a Home Depot, and a Le Boutique de la Target.  Oh, and there's a HUGE mall now, where before there was only an old fashioned trading post.  The entire landscape has changed, and it keeps changing.  Every time I come down here, there's something new in a spot that was previously empty.  It's somewhat discombobulating, to say the least, because, as I drive around, all the familiar landmarks are either gone, or have changed beyond recognition.  I expect I will get lost more than once while I'm down here, even if it hasn't happened yet.

One of the things that has changed is Rough Hollow.  When I was seventeen, I nannied for my nephews for a summer, and we would always go out on the boat and head down to Rough Hollow because there was a rope swing there.  I don't know who put up the rope swing, but bless them for it, because it provided quite a lot of entertainment over the years.  Lake Travis is an interesting lake.  Even though it looks incredibly natural, like it's been there for thousands of years, it's only been in existence for a little more than sixty years.  It was created after they dammed off the eastern branch of the Colorado river for electricity purposes.  Due to the fact that this is the Texas Hill Country, the water rushed into huge valleys and trenches and, on this side of the lake anyway, there is no such thing as a beach.  You jump in, off a limestone cliff, and it's instantly sixty-five-feet deep.  So, you can perhaps see, how Rough Hollow would be one of the safest places on earth for a rope swing that dumped you directly into a lake.  No worries about breaking a neck here.

But the Rough Hollow I knew is no longer.  It has now been developed, and there are McMansions set up cheek and jowl over the available landscape.  Now, normally I would think this was a bad thing, because I'm not really fond of McMansions, but because the available lake front land in Lakeway is not what you'd consider de rigeur for a place named "Lakeway," it's actually a good development.  Sure, there are plenty of houses in Lakeway that have a lake view, and some which actually have lake access (which usually means they have an elevator or a tram, or a very steep set of limestone stairs built in so they can get down to the water from their cliff-top houses), but the geography of the place dictates that actual lake front houses are limited in supply.  Usually you have to wait for someone to cack before you can get your hands on one, and even then that's not a given because the family might swoop in a keep the place, just because the lot is valuable, even if the house that rests upon it isn't.  Rough Hollow has trebled the amount of lake front/lake view real estate in Lakeway---and that's a good thing. 

The only problem with this scenario is that very few of the houses in Rough Hollow that I've been able to take a peek at actually have lake access. 

Why does this matter to me?  Well, because I have a dream, and it's a dream I've had since I first got a ride on my aunt and uncle's boat when I was six or seven.  Like most people, I've ditched most of the dreams I had when I was a child.  I never wanted a pony, but I did want to live in a lifesized Barbie Townhouse, and to shop at a real life Barbie Fashion Plaza, among other things.  But, again, like most people, I ditched those dreams when I got older, because they didn't hold up to real life expectations.  But the one thing I swore to myself, that I promised myself, I would have when I got older, was a ski boat.  I've never lost the desire to be able to race across large expanses of water at a high rate of speed.  I love this.  It's fun.  It's exhilarating.  It's liberating.  It engenders in me the sense of freedom you first felt when you were a kid and you were finally able to explore your neighborhood on your first set of wheels, without your parents knowing what you were up to and where you were going.  Hence the promise to myself.  However, I noticed what a freakin' hassle boating can be.  Schlepping all your crap to the marina, loading up the boat, stowing everything away, working your way through the no wake zone to finally get out on the water---and that's if your boat is in a marina in the first place, and not in some storage unit or your driveway, where you have to tow it to the lake in the first place.  All that crap just takes forever.  Now, I'm sure some people enjoy all that stuff.  They like having another thing to care for and maintain to help fill the hours. They like scrubbing the bottom of the boat with Tidy Bowl, because someone in the Ozarks told them it worked great to keep things clean.  I don't.  I want a boat that I can walk up to, throw off the lines, put in reverse, and then race off with.  Hence, when I was here in Lakeway for my seventeenth summer, I started to hatch a plan that would make it easier for me to take up boating as a hobby.  My plan entailed a lake front house, with water access, here on Lake Travis, because there is no other lake, in my estimation, that is as great for boating as Lake Travis.  It's big, which means there is a lot of space to speed, and even if there is a lot of traffic on the main portions, there is always some nook or cranny where you can drop anchor, and laze about for the rest of the day.  It's perfect.  You couldn't ask for anything more.  But, if I want a boat, I want it to be easy.  I realize there will always be some maintenence issues, but if I've got enough money to buy a lake front house, I'll have enough money to hire someone from a local marina to look after my boat.  See how this all works out?  It's perfect.  I am a canny chick. 

The only problem with this scenario as of right now is, of course, money.  Lake houses are expensive, particularly where I want to live, which is here in Lakeway, because it's not off the beaten path, on a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere, as so many of the lake houses are outside of Lakeway.  I need some civilization in my life, unlike my brother, who has a lake house on Travis, but whose goal in life is to live "off the grid" and whose house is, naturally, somewhat out of the way, and who paid much, much less for his little slice of heaven because he was willing to be out in the middle of nowhere.  But it's all relative.  I'm accustomed to living in a major metropolitan area, in a nice neighborhood, where the type of house I grew up in, a five bedroom colonial, would cost you, roughly, a mil five or up.  These lake houses may cost two or three mil, but when you're used to that kind of inflation for a house in a regular, normal neighborhood without lake access or anything really special in that sense, what's a few more mil in your imaginary world, anyway?  All of this is pure speculation on my part.  But, one day, when we're ready, all the speculating will pay off, because I will know what I want, where I want it, and how I want it to be.  So, given that we know lake access realty is rare and pricey in Lakeway, finding out last summer that they'd developed Rough Hollow, was something of a boon to my fantasies: more places to choose from.  Yet, of course, there's is another downer besides the McMansion aspect: and that's that most of the houses in Rough Hollow, as I discovered yesterday when I was out walking around the developments, don't have lake access from the houses.  There is, of course, a marina and it's my guess that they developed it as such to pimp boat owners on the marina.  One of the things that I really want is lake access: it's a dealbreaker.  Again, I just want to be able to walk up to my boat, turn the engine on, throw off the lines and the bumpers, throw it into reverse and then, after I change gears, of course, to be able to speed away.  It doesn't look as if that's an option in Rough Hollow, and that's a serious downer in my little fantasy world.   

Sigh. 

Ah, well.  I still have some area in Rough Hollow to discover, and maybe I'll see what I want in the meantime.