When we listed our cabin for sale during our return trip from Grand Tour 2015, we expected a long wait, and planned to return in September to continue maintenance and upgrades to make it more “move-in ready,” if you can say that about a shelter with no running water and minimal solar/battery power.  To our surprise, there was a lot of activity, probably due to the amateur photo spread we produced to focus on the cabin more than the land.  In August, we got an offer, and negotiated a settlement that satisfied all concerned.

The buyers are a young couple with a small child and horses, who intend to follow our dream of expanding the cabin into a proper starter house and future guest cottage while they build something more conventional.  Meanwhile, they have a place for their horses .and a “camp” that might see them into winter, with a few upgrades.

So, we went to Montana a bit early, to do a final walk-through and sign papers, before heading to a planned week’s retreat at Lake Chelan.  Again, we had planned that part of the trip to do some bicycling around the orchards and vinyards near Manson, but the still-active wildfires on both sides of the lake portended a smoky week, so we left the bicycle at home.  When we left, to visit a friend in North Idaho, taking a seldom-used route up the west side of Flathead Lake and west to Hot Springs, following MT 200 from Plains to the Idaho border, we left Montana for the first time in 21 years without a place of our own to go back to.  Truly, the end of an era, and the longest period of time either of us have owned property.

We left behind a lot of memories, the cabin evolving from a bare shell where we slept on an air mattress and cooked on a camp stove and lit the night with candles and oil lamps to a cozy little home with sheet-rocked walls and a real bed and solar battery-powered lights.  Our connection with the outside world advanced from trying to tune in Montana Public Radio through fading signals alternately from Missoula or Kalispell on a hand-crank-powered radio to a clear signal from the new Polson transmitter on an inverter-powered receiver.  But, even though the cabin was still unfinished (taping and spackling the sheet rock would require removing furniture and collecting enough water to clean up the dust), it would need even more maintenance, as would the two hectares surrounding it.  We simply no longer had the time and ability to keep up with it from 900 km away.  We’ll be back to Montana (this time, in only a week), with connections in Polson, Missoula, and Hamilton, but as temporary visitors.