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Buy Overseas to Make Travel and Adventure Part of Your Life Right Now
“But haven't we done this already? Haven't we already bought an old stone house surrounded by mud? Isn't that what we just did in Ireland? Why do you guys want to do this again?”
In 2004, my husband, Lief, our two children, and I spent a week touring around Istria, Croatia, with a focused agenda. We were in the market for one of the old white stone houses you find across this peninsula. To that end, Kaitlin, 15; Jackson, 5; Lief; and I, in one car, followed our property agent, in her car, from one stone farmhouse to another, up and down the narrow winding roads of these mountainsides, through the medieval villages, and past the ever-present fields of olive trees, grape vines, and sunflowers.
We had recently made our move, from Ireland to France, and one rainy morning of that Istrian family adventure, standing in one more muddy Istrian farmyard, Kaitlin made the observation I share at the opening of this chapter. Probably she wasn't the only one wondering what in the world we were doing. Having just relocated to Paris, where we were still in the process of renovating the apartment that would be our home in that city, busy with other business and investment projects, why had we gotten it into our heads that we wanted to buy a 200-year-old house on the side of a mountain in the middle of the Istrian Peninsula?
Because we liked it there. We wanted to stake our small claim to this beautiful and historic region ...
