Try on Tryon
At the tender age of 43, I am finally a first time homebuyer. And as most homeowners can attest, this didn't happen the easy way.
For beginners, Liebi and I hunt high and low, from Lake Lure to Asheville to Lake Norman and beyond. We have the housing market going for us - clearly this is a buyer's market if there ever was one, and you think it would be simple to get a house in North Carolina at a knockdown price.
Numerous realtors and months later, we are able to close following mountains of paperwork, and yet here I am, somebody who is going to see his own home for the first time. The running joke around the Embassy is that I, Andrew, am going to see a house he'd bought but hasn't seen yet. Enjoy whatever it is you bought in that bag, man. Wink, wink.
In my own defense, I have already seen dozens of houses that eventually one of us would turn down, for one reason or the other. It seems Liebi and I look for different things in houses: she prefers the interior, I prefer to have enough space and enough yard for the kids to go as nuts as a bag of trail mix. Liebi goes to training for a week in April, then hangs on another week of leave and continues our never-ending quest for a house we can agree on. We finally narrow the search down on the internet to a dozen houses that we both find interesting. That said, Liebi will have the absolute power to sign whatever she feels like or to enter into negotiations for any real estate she finds interesting enough, simply because she has something I utterly lack: taste. Hand it to her, usually when she buys something, it's a winner.
As is the house, hands down. Not to mention the area.
When you drive through the western and southwestern part of North Carolina, there is an endless carpet of wooded hills on both sides of the highways, this huge green ocean that defies even the most experienced traveler's imagination. It's safe to say we are a family of fish now living in that ocean somewhere.
Tryon itself is a small town of around 1,700 people, has suffered greatly because of the recession, and has seen many businesses go belly up, plus the foreclosed homes. It was established with the railroad in the 19th century, as a pit stop for travelers and traders alike, long before planes and automobiles became fashionable. It has one famous native son, or should I say daughter: Nina Simone, a jazz singer whose tunes I would regularly listen to while I was a volunteer in the Peace Corps. Children go where I tell you, she used to sing. For us, that clearly means Tryon.
Tryon only has a couple of restaurants, a theater, and little else. Only so many people to service in one small town, I suppose.
The house itself: a 1920's Tudor style house, really built for people well under six feet, but well kept up and sitting on a property of almost five acres (hello, tree house and zip lines), all in a neighborhood that is as hard to find as the needle in the proverbial haystack (remember the green wooded hills?). Some work needs to be done, certainly. The railing on the balcony is a mess and appears that it can be knocked down by a sneeze or two in the right direction. Certain things are simply outdated (tiles, locks), but these are minor things that can be amended easily. The house is good enough for us to spend two nights in when we arrive. The kids refer to the house as 'The Gingerbread House'.
Nearby there's an excellent community park, Harmon Field, with roofed outdoor basketball courts, an excellent playground near the river, and plenty of space to host an outside gathering. There's an excellent track, tennis courts, and a couple of baseball diamonds. Tryon itself has over 40 inches of rain per year, more than Seattle, and we are treated to a couple of these during our stay.
And so the circle closes. I come from a small town, and now my first house is in a small town after living non-stop in big cities over the past 15 plus years. Play the John Cougar Mellencamp song Small Town for easy reference. It's a wonderful place, either way you look at it, and finally the golden anchor the kids can now call home whenever we're on leave.
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