Thinking of a place in the mountains

Call it being romantic. Call it wanting to be closer to nature. Or even just to have a getaway. But the reality is that many dream of owning a small cabin “away from it all”. Instagram is full of cosy cabin pics idealising the lifestyle – like van life – of living in a small space in the depths of the wilderness. Heck, entire YouTube channels exist because of this aspiration.

So is this going to be yet another blog on the same lines? I’d like to say “no”, that I want to be different here. But even if you think there’s little difference between A Little Cabin in the Alps and the one you’ll click after this, that’s fine. What I want to do here is share my story, what brought me to looking for somewhere, how I came to find A Little Cabin in the Alps, how much I paid and the whole buying process. If you find that helpful, I’m delighted. If you forget about me, I won’t take it personally!

I’m fully aware that the trend is now video. However I really do not like being in front of a camera – I’m too self-critical I think. I do have a podcast but that’s not related to Alpine cabins. So whilst I may put up some videos here, the main emphasis will be the “old-style” written blog.

A bit about me first so you can put me in a box – as well as give you some context as to how I came to A Little Cabin in the Alps. I’m Irish but haven’t been living there for the past 20 years or so. Born and raised in Dublin – the northside for those who know about Dublin! Went to Mount Temple school – and yes Bono, Edge, Adam, Ali (Bono’s wife) were all in my class. Larry the year below me. And yes I out-headlined them once. But let me not get distracted!

I got into mountaineering and after a (16 year!) stint working in the insurance industry, branched off completely sideways to start running a mountaineering company with another Irish guide offering trips in the Alps, Pyrenees, Iceland, Andes in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina… Got tired of living in airports and travelling all over the planet so I, together with my young family at the time, decided to move to Morocco, as you do(!) and focus on offering trekking and winter mountaineering trips in the High Atlas.

After another 16 years – see a pattern developing?! – of guiding, my body was telling me to calm down a touch. This was in 2011 and the so-called “Arab Spring” had started in North Africa and the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of refugees started walking to Europe with 2015 being the peak. With these images on TV being a driver, I went “back” to uni in the UK, did a MSc in post-conflict development and started working with humanitarian NGOs in post-conflict and conflict contexts such as Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. I was in Iraq during the peak of the conflict with ISIS in 2016/17 and Mosul, the epi-centre of the fighting in Iraq, was a city I began to know well. After leaving Iraq, I went to work in Afghanistan for 18 months but had left there before the country finally fell to the Taliban in 2021.

Indeed I left Afghanistan in the late summer of 2020 when the world was struggling with a global pandemic. Lockdowns, curfews, social-distancing and masks suddenly became normal conversation topics and a way of “living”. Many many people sadly lost loved ones and suffered – and still are – terribly. I didn’t, so in no way I want to give the idea that I suffered particularly. However the reality of coming out of working in conflict settings such as I had done for the previous 5 years, returning to a Europe with everything closed and Zoom suddenly becoming the means of communication, a Dutch winter where the sun appeared fleetingly a couple of times a month (no exaggeration!), I found myself really yearning for a place in the mountains. A place that I could just enjoy, go walking from, have potentially more chance of seeing light and shadows instead of monotone grey skies, and to have a place of solitude where I could begin the process of what I call, re-connecting, with my inner self.

Some will call that idea a luxury. And it is. But I knew that if – and that was a big “if” I found a place - I wanted to share it with others – anyone in fact that really needed a getaway. Those, who like me, were burnt out of the NGO world. Those who wanted a retreat place. Those who had lost their job and couldn’t afford the commercial rates of airbnb or similar. Because as well as wanting to have a place that I could share with others, I didn’t want income – or lack of – to be a barrier to access. My daughter used to run a vegan café in the UK and when she had to close that down with Covid, she began delivering food hampers in her area on a “pay as you can” basis. I was very impressed with that model and so promised myself that this would be how I would like to have any such cabin that I would be lucky enough to own.

And so, slowly I allowed myself to begin thinking of where and how. I had a few, some self-imposed, boundaries. I didn’t want to spend days and days driving from where I live in the Netherlands (between Amsterdam and Utrecht). So whilst the Apennines, central Italy looked very nice, they were too far away really. Similar for anything south of the Pyrenees on the French Spanish border.

My budget was absolute max €50k but I was more comfortable with €40k. This was to include all legal fees, everything. Give me a screwdriver and I get stressed. I’m not a DIY handyman by any stretch! So I needed a place that wasn’t falling apart – or I needed to engage a builder to do it up for me – but again all within my budget.

So that’s the background. Next piece I write I’ll detail where I looked, how I looked, what I found, how long it took me to find A Little Cabin in the Alps and what the process for buying it was.

See you soon!

PS - if you have any queries or comments - leave them in Comments section below.