We were supposed to meet our friends Katie and Will for brunch one hot summer morning but that didn’t exactly happen. Oli and I were working in New York for a few weeks in between our time in Sydney and San Francisco, and taking advantage of that time to stay in our old neighborhood and catch up with our friends.

We were both putting off leaving the air-conditioned bedroom for the sticky rest of the house (you go, no you go) when I spotted a post from my aunt on Facebook. It’s long gone now, but it said something like, “The original family Munson farm is up for sale! I wish someone in our family could buy it!” There was a link to a real estate ad, one of my favorite kind of links.

The listing wasn’t impressive, but I wanted to see it anyway. “Let’s skip brunch and go see it,” I said to Oli, flopping over on my side. “Oh yeah?” he said, continuing to look at his phone. “Yes! We could rent a car, drive halfway, stay the night, go see it and then come back. It’ll be a weekend getaway!” I texted Katie and Will to convince them to go with us. The jist of their message was, “Give us 30 minutes to pack, we’ll meet you at the bagel shop.”

We stayed in an Airbnb in the Catskills, had a lovely dinner at a farm to table restaurant in a tiny town, and made our way away from the “cool” part of upstate New York and into the farmland of central New York. By the time we walked through the house and were on our way back to New York, I was convinced we had to buy the place. Now I just had to convince Oli.