What Could Have Been

Like nearly every expat looking for change, we briefly toyed with the idea of opening an inn. Back before we bought the molino, we came very close to buying the Casona del Tilo, a big old Asturian farmhouse not far from Villaviciosa that two Spaniards had turned into a bed and breakfast.

We spent one night at the Casona, as sort of a trial run. The next morning, on our way out, we visited El Malain, a self-serve berry farm nearby where I eventually made myself sick from eating too many raspberries. The whole time we were there picking fruit, I fantasized about inn-keeping life, fantasies that mostly revolved around collecting fresh eggs daily from the chicken coop out back and making jam for our guests' breakfasts from the blackberries we could get at El Malain.

Eventually we remembered that innkeeping also involved a lot of dirty sheets and few days off, and that, more to the point, the Casona's price tag was several hundred thousand euros to the north of what we could afford. But I still have those homesteading impulses, which is why we spent the morning earlier this week back at El Malain filling far more boxes with berries than we could eat. Or at least with more than we could eat before mold overtook them--another lesson in keeping one's fantasies in proportion to one's reality.