Urban Asylum Seekers

When the pandemic hit, Susan Goldberg and Geoffrey Etnire found themselves stuck in D.C. Goldberg, the Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic, and her husband, a real estate lawyer, no longer had a way to escape their crowded city life.

“My wife and I traveled a lot--almost an obscene amount--until the pandemic,” Etnire said. “When the pandemic hit, our international travel was curbed and our domestic travel was curbed.”

With no end in sight, in the summer of 2020, the couple decided to travel to Asheville, North Carolina, to look for a second home in the summer of 2020.

“We began getting sort of restless to get out of the Beltway and out of our complicated lives,” Etnire said. “Travel used to be our outlet, and we thought that maybe we should do something we had never done before.”

On their way back from Asheville, the couple drove north on Interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley and decided to tweak their plans. Over the next month, they began spending weekends in the area, looking for homes they could move into immediately and gradually renovate.

After looking in Virginia at Woodstock and Eastern Shore, the two realized they didn’t want to be around so many making the same escape. Both places are within two hours of Washington, which makes them popular spots for Washingtonians to have second homes.

“It was a real shock to us when we realized that Woodstock and closer-in places won't get us outside of D.C.,” Etnire said. “We'll just be around people that we see inside the Beltway.”

So, the couple adjusted their search again and quickly fell in love with Lexington. “In Lexington our neighbors will be people from Rockbridge County and people who went to school in Rockbridge,” Etnire said. “It’s a great mixture of people and the politics are very refreshingly different than in D.C.”

Etnire and Goldberg had hoped to find a home that they could move into and slowly renovate over time. However, the two were unsatisfied with the limited selection. Instead, they settled for a piece of land near the old Oxford Presbyterian Church. The four-acre parcel of land was subdivided from a larger 80-acre property. There are several other parcels being developed as well.

Before signing the contract in December of 2020, the couple made sure they would not be completely isolated from their lives in DC.

“I was not going to sign anything until BARC confirmed that they were actually going to install broadband at the house,” Etnire said.

The electric company had said it was planning on installing cables under the gravel road leading up to the house but had not set a date. After confirming that they would, in fact, have internet, the couple purchased the land.

“We could not have done the move without broadband. When we're living there, we're having to work and talk to people all over the country and all over the world,” Etnire said. “We just couldn't do it. If we had bad internet reception we would pull our hair out.”

By March of 2021, construction began. The couple said that they were able to avoid issues with the supply chain by ordering materials in advance. After over a year of construction, the home will finally be ready to move in on July 1.

“We don't want Rockbridge or Lexington to be any different than it has been. We're not coming here hoping that it will do this or do that for us. We're just accepting it the way it is and living out here.”