On the way to Junction, Texas.
Driving on FM 385 from Junction to Harper , the inside of my truck smelled like a BBQ pit. I had stopped at Cooper’s BBQ stand in Junction and had lunch at the Llano River (meat was too salty, and the tea too sweet. Be sure to catch the OTHER Cooper’s BBQ in Llano. That one is amazing). I was not intending to go as far as Junction, but I figured what the heck I’m already in Kerrville, might as well mosey a few more miles down the road and take a look at some property that I saw in a local newspaper. Again, the weather was wonderful, if not a bit cloudy.
This was the last of a series of road trips that I will be taking for a while until I start planning out how I am going to look for land. This was as far West as I was going to go for my search, so I wanted to be sure that I knew what it was like out here. A billboard in town said Junction, Texas, was the “porch to the West”. I have to believe it. The area out here looked like a combination of the Texas Hill Country + West Texas. Huge swaths of rocky hills were sliced open to give way to one of the best scenic highways in Texas, I-10. This highway was darn clean. It was funny seeing the highway “skittled” with colorful license plates from all over the country: California, New Mexico, Arizona, Oregon, Florida. What’s strange is that these states are weather and sightseeing meccas. What they doing here?
“They be buying up all the land here,” said the lady at a small gas station in Junction. “They buy those ranches here and then leave back to their home states. A single year of their mortgage in their home states is enough to buy a nice ranch here,” she twanged. “Besides, ” she continued, ” they all complain how crowded it is over in California.”
I had stopped at the store there to pick up some local papers for my land search. I figured I’d check the classifieds and find out how they compared to realtor listings. The prices were about the same–there were some nuggets in there, though. One man was selling 28acres West of Kerrville for around 38,000. Said he just wanted to get rid of it. I bet he sold it less than three hours. This was one of the cheapest I’ve seen. I once talked to a man who advertised his land on craigslist, a famous classifieds system that is available only on the Internet. He said he sold the land for more than 3x what he was asking for in only less than 2 days! The buyer bought it sight unseen.
More about my travels in the next day or so.