I have always been an independent person. Tell me I can't do something and you'll be ensuring the fact that I can and I will or will die trying. But until I reached this point in my life, the world was something I had only read about. With a bachelor's degree and 30 hours of post-graduate study in English, I've read books of every genre, set in all corners of the world, in all times, under all conditions, featuring the lives of real and fictional people of all types. While I've always wanted to see the world and always assumed I would, I hadn't actually started doing it. I wasn't getting any younger. Why continue to explore the world vicariously rather than experience it for myself?
Of course, to see the world, I would need a passport. Sadly, I didn't have a passport until my baby brother and his wife decided to get married in Mexico in 2009. Had it not been for 9-11, I wouldn't have even needed a passport to go there. The fact is, I'd traversed the border with Mexico three times before the wedding -- the only times I'd ventured outside the land of my birth.
I realized that my once-used passport was gold. It would allow me to go where I wanted, when I wanted. It was magic. I couldn't wait to start collecting the inked stamps from countries in Europe and beyond. Nothing could stop me now.
I went back to my computer. What I learned quickly about Slovenia was that property there was actually affordable. I bookmarked a webpage for Euro-to-Dollar conversions and went to work. I continued to look at properties in Italy but had moved up out of the Tuscan sun and into the northern part of the country where prices were more reasonable. I was amazed at times for what passed as a "house" on both sides of this border. Some of them give the term "fixer-upper" a whole new meaning -- crumbling shells of ancient stone farmhouses and villas. Still, there's a charm about them. They are, after all, in Europe.
It didn't take me long to start discovering the difference in standards between homes in the States and homes in this part of the world. There's a reason the listings refer to the place where you prepare meals as "kitchenettes" and not "kitchens." I love to cook and bake. I practically lived in my big, roomy kitchen/hearth room in the house I was going to leave. I'm all for "quaint" and "old world," but an apartment-sized four-burner stove, four-foot tall refrigerator, single sink and countertop equaling the square inches of my desktop in the first grade did not constitute a kitchen. No problem, right? You just knock down a wall or two and make it larger. Oh, let me rephrase: you knock down a two-foot thick stone wall or two and make it larger. And you can do that only if there's actually a room adjacent to the aforementioned kitchenette. Hmmm.
Now, let's talk bathrooms. Admittedly, most Americans are spoiled by the number and size of our bathrooms. A typical four-bedroom house in the States will have at least two and one-half bathrooms if not four and one-half. When you're looking at lovely old Slovenian or Italian four-bedroom farmhouses, you might find one bathroom typically about the size of a telephone booth. (For those of you too young to remember telephone booths, that's small.) But since a few of the houses I looked at didn't even have bathrooms, I quickly stopped complaining.
My challenge was becoming quite obvious. I would need to find a property I could renovate to accommodate those features my future guests would consider basic: private bathrooms where a person can't brush his teeth and lean over the sink while sitting on the toilet (or the bidet), decent-sized rooms large enough for a bed with at least a queen-size mattress (not two twin beds pushed together) and for me, a kitchen where I could prepare fabulous meals for them.
I was learning a lot about the differences between America and Europe and I hadn't yet even decided where to visit first. The internet is truly a wonderful thing; perhaps as magical as my passport.
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