When you live in the Midwest’s “Tornado Alley,” you develop a love/hate relationship with mobile homes. This time of year it seems like there’s a daily news story about someone who just went through the whole process of mobile home refinancing only to have a tornado destroy their residence the very next day.

So when an opportunity came up last week for VH and I to purchase a little piece of lakeside property from an acquaintance who’d inherited the land, then couldn’t afford the property tax, we hesitantly looked in mobile home loans.

I confess: I love the thought of having a place on the lake where we could spend weekends fishing and boating, a place to get away from the daily routine. Besides, having a lake property would mean an end to the seemingly endless excuses VH comes up with to avoid taking a vacation.

And really, I told VH, real estate’s usually a good financial investment. Why, not that long ago Warren Buffet wanted to buy a huge portfolio of manufactured home loans. If it’s good enough for Warren, it ought to be good enough for us, too, right?

I thought I had a great point. I was certain we were this close to signing on the dotted line. So close, in fact, that I’d already started dusting off my tackle box and browsing the classified ads in search of a good, used fishing boat.

Then VH pointed something out: buying that piece of property would mean having two homes to keep clean, two yards to maintain and two places where dirt, dust and laundry would all pile up.

I am so over my desire for a vacation home now that it’s dawned on me that it wouldn’t entail a vacation for me at all.

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