Aerial View

Here are a couple aerial photos of the lot. This first one is zoomed in as far as possible. The red star is at the intersection of County Rd. 3 (north/south oriented) and 500th St. My piece of land goes about to the top of this map and is half as wide east to west as it is long north to south. It's something like 320 feet by 640 feet.


The big brown to the left visible in the zoomed out map is an agricultural field, I believe. In this second map, my land is about a quarter the width of the green strip to the left of the star, and twice as long as it is wide, so the north edge of the lot is about where that group of trees kind of has a leg sticking down (except that leg of trees is actually north of my neighbor's lot since it's a bit west of my lot). If I'm looking at it right (not sure I am), those trees are all on my cousin Paul's land. I have five acres, the neighbor to the left has five, then there is another ten stretching as far left as the green area goes for a total of twenty acres. Paul's big group of trees lies on another 20 acres to the north that is the same shape (if that makes any sense at all...)

Proximity to Itasca State Park

Here Dave and I are pictured at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Itasca State Park located about 15 miles from where I'll build.





This is my sister Corrie's family at Lake Itasca summer 2009.

Proximity Maps

Cool, I'm figuring stuff out! Here are some location reference maps. Cabin site is indicated by a red star. It's about 13 miles to Bemidji which is a big town on a big lake. Plantagenet Lake is about 10 miles and I fished there last summer (and took these pictures) with my cousin Paul, my brother-in-law Dave, our grandpa, and various other family members. Click/drag to pan maps, or click +/- to zoom in & out.

Here's Grandpa on the shore of what I think is Plantagenet Lake. We went to several that looked similar to this and were close to my cabin site.


Cousin Paul and Grandpa bringing the boat in.













Dave, Justin, and Nathan with a northern pike.













Grandpa, Joel, Rachel, Malachi and Paul on another nearby lake.

Lot Photos

So I just figured out how to post multiple pictures in one post, cool! These are photos I took last summer around the time I purchased the 5 acre lot. The dirt road pictured here is 500th St. In the distance, there is a tiny-looking stop sign which marks the intersection of the paved County Rd. 3. This photo looks eastward. One interesting thing is all the rural roads out there are laid out in an evenly spaced numerical grid so it's easy to know how far it is to where you're headed. A great advantage is emergency services can get where they're going without spending a ton of time locating addresses. I wish Cloverdale had been laid out like this when I was firefighting there!

This is about the middle of the property looking north. In the far distance there are pine trees visible which are on the adjacent 20 acre lot owned by my cousin Paul and his wife Melanie who sold me the land :-) They subdivided so I could afford this smaller piece. Their house is about five miles south on the same county road as these lots. I can't wait to visit all my family in MN!

These two images show how the land has a nice variety of vegetation. This is a patch of deciduous trees (poplars probably) near the pond. Farther to the north, there are a few conifers as well; spruce I think. One thing I'm looking forward to is planting more trees on the lot. I'd like to add some maples and probably a lot more conifers. I like pine trees. Also, I'm considering investing in a fog machine and some baby redwoods.

First Photograph!

This is a photo of the little pond that is on the southeast corner of the lot. The lot sits on the corner of a dirt road intersecting a paved 2 lane county highway. This pond is right near where the two roads meet. I'm hoping to situate the cabin in a way that it might view the water. One of the considerations is where to place the driveway; should I enter from the highway or the dirt road??

El Post Numero Uno

Voy a to write mis blogs en spanglish. Just kidding, English from here on out. I just set up my blog right this minute. I'm in CA still, but getting very excited to head out to Minnesota in like 3 weeks. I'm not excited about leaving Lynea in California, but I try to focus on how much longer the future is than the amount of time I'll be gone. In the meantime, we're doing lots of great bonding with activities like watching TV, rollerskating aaaaaand....

Tonight I worked on a spread sheet!!! That's how excited I am about learning to use MS Excel, 3 exclamation points worth. Lynea helped me set up a spread sheet to track the steps I need to do to build my cabin. I'm hoping I figure out a way to post that on here so my progress can be tracked visually on a chart. The spreadsheet has columns for projected and actual costs and time frames.

Now I'm going to go write some sort of introduction to explain what this blog is all about! I hope I wasn't supposed to do that first... I've never tried blogging before :-) Yay!

<3 Jon