Frugal French Girl: Our own version of The Country Mouse & The City Mouse!

While I was visiting my niece Adele and her family in Alberta recently, she took me on several tours of abandoned properties. I guess technically we were trespassing, but we had a lot of fun doing it and didn't get arrested or escorted off any properties via owners with shotguns! Adele knows me quite well and had these places scoped out a year before my trip knowing how much I would enjoy them.

We pulled off the highway and parked in a country drive overgrown with weeds and exited the car. As I closed the passenger side door, the hair on the back of my neck immediately stood up. I stopped, and stood frozen by the eerie looking sight before me. The abandoned house and outbuildings looked seriously haunted. The dark holes that once held window panes looked ominous, foreboding.

We'd been to others, but they hadn't creeped me out like this one. I was feeling somewhat reluctant with this house. Adele firmly planted one foot on the barbed wire fence to allow me to step over it without killing myself, and said: "Come on Auntie, let's go!"

My heart almost stopped as the distinct sound of bees, a lot of them, the buzzing became louder and louder as we approached. I said: "Uh, hmm, maybe we should go to another one, I hear bees, don't you?" She just laughed and told me not to be a scaredy cat!

For some reason the story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse came to mind, hmm, why couldn't I remember how that story ended? All of a sudden it mattered to me! UGH!

As I was taking in the scenery outside the house, with my happy camera snapping away, and trying to gauge where the buzzing was coming from, a VERY LARGE flock of birds came flying out of a second floor window of the old farmhouse. I was totally freaked out, jumped a mile high and a rather long streak of swearwords escaped my mouth, some maybe in french even! As I stood there, trying to recover my breath, and checked my feet for a puddle, my lovely niece simply laughed (a lot and very loudly) and just carried on to investigate.

She pointed to one side of the house where several beehive boxes sat and said: "See auntie, no worries, that is where the buzzing is coming from!" Oh, what a relief! NOT.

She walked around to the other side of the house, looked into a large window and pointed out that the walls inside were painted my favorite color, turquoise. Lovely, I said, just f-en lovely. "Are there bodies in this one?" I thought out loud.

This one had a sign above the front door dubbing it "Lakeview", the year 1944 and the name M. Sather scrawled into the cement step.

She coaxed me into entering it, slowly I walked around, admiring the old casings around the windows, and other architectural details of the old farmhouse. When Adele climbed the narrow steps to the upstairs bedrooms, I followed, trying not to scream in horror. No, really.
There were bird droppings everywhere & birds nests in every corner.

The views from the windows to the vast acreage beyond was beautiful.

When we got upstairs, more birds flew out, which forced me to scream, in spite of my effort to avoid doing it again. The roof had caved in in one part, letting daylight in, and adding to the whole eerie feeling.

One bird flew back in, causing another loud scream to escape me, and flew into the closet where her nest full of eggs was, trying to scare us away.

Once I started breathing again, I looked down and saw a "rather dead" mouse, which of course caused me to scream (yes, again!) and run out in horror. I have a terrible fear of rodents, dead or alive. I could hear laughing coming from behind me, yet again. Darned kid, was I fearless like her when I was thirty?

Well, now I knew what happened to the City Mouse, didn't I? DEAD!

The back of the house had an entrance to the root cellar. My hilarious niece wanted to check that out too. "Uh, NO THANK YOU" I said. I may have screamed it. Either way, it was out of the question.

We proceeded to check out the old, falling down, decrepit outbuildings.