The story so far
I thought I would start my blog by giving you a condensed overview of our adventure so far and what we´re planning to do next. A lot of incidents need to be dealt with in much more detail but I will do this at a later stage, maybe when we´ve had a relatively quiet day without too much happening (although this is quite a rare occurrence). I hope you will find my blog entertaining as well as useful in case you are thinking of emigrating yourself. I would be interested to hear any comments you wish to make and would be delighted to answer any questions you might have, provided I know the answer. So, here we go: this is the story so far.
My husband and I had been toying with the idea of moving to Spain for a while and when we stumbled across our dream house in the Alpujarras during our Easter break in Andalucía last year, we made a spur of the moment offer which was accepted by the seller, to our delight and apprehension. Back in the UK, we both resigned from our teaching jobs, only to be informed two weeks later by the estate agent in Spain that the vendors had changed their minds and did not want to sell the property after all. As we had already imagined our new life in too much detail to want to give up on our plans for a fresh start in Andalucía, we decided to go ahead with the move and scheduled our departure to southern Spain for mid-September.
We had booked our annual summer holiday in Greece well before the decision was made to emigrate, so off we went to the island of Lesvos where we had been recharging our batteries each summer for the past 9 years. We had a very lazy time, knowing that this would probably be our last holiday there, for some time at least, and trying to forget that back in England we would eventually have to get started on packing up the contents of our house. (We had finally sold it the year before, after more than two highly frustrating years of allowing a lot of timewasters to wander around feigning interest in buying it, in some cases for a very long time. Fortunately, our eventual purchaser was not only a man of honour but also, conveniently, someone who spent a lot of time working overseas and was willing to rent it to us for a year or so before moving in.)
What we didn´t know was that there would be an email from our benevolent landlord awaiting us upon our return to Norfolk in mid-August telling us that his plans had changed and that he needed to move into the house in early September. We eventually agreed on 11th September as the ´handover´ date which gave us a date to work towards (which was good) but also meant that we didn´t have that much time to pack up an entire household; in fact, we had exactly three weeks (which was not so good). Amazing what you need to think about when leaving the country; the first few days of our three remaining weeks in the UK were taken up with making phonecalls to sort out telephone, electricity, gas, council tax, medical cover, bank accounts, checkups at the doctor and dentist, cat passports, cattery, cat travel, skip and van hire, a seemingly endless list. On the one hand, it was very therapeutic and liberating to get rid of stuff which had been cluttering up the house and outbuilding for the past 8 years but on the other hand it was often heart-breaking to see many little treasures and mementos of sentimental value ending up in a rusty old skip. Many arguments ensued: “You can´t throw that away, it was given to me by ... ”. Eventually we avoided verbal confrontation by waiting for the right moment to extract and hide away something so heartlessly discarded by the other.
The days and weeks went by rather too quickly and there were times when I questioned my sanity. Many tears were shed (mainly by me) and many irate words exchanged. A move is stressful at the best of times as we all know, but a move abroad … You know your marriage is rock solid if you come out of such an experience still together but I must confess that the word ´divorce´ was probably the most used word over those horrible three weeks. Luckily, we had friends and family (my father flew in from Germany) to help us with the move and I am pleased to say that we are all still on speaking terms. We stored our furniture in a friend´s stable block and loaded our most treasured belongings into our Nissan X Trail. We had had a lot of faith as to the car´s load capacity – far too much faith as it turned out. Several boxes, mostly containing books, DVDs, kitchen utensils, shoes and handbags, had to be left behind with our long-suffering friends Pat and Sue and we finally left with the car very tightly packed (I don´t think you would have managed to squeeze in one more CD).
The journey was enjoyable by contrast with all that had gone immediately before. We took the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, a 36-hour crossing, and were able, finally, to relax after three very stressful weeks. The sea was mercifully calm, we docked - and started our journey south by getting hopelessly lost. Satellite navigation indeed. Reacquainting ourselves with the lost art of map-reading, we stayed overnight in beautiful Toledo in central Spain before finally arriving in the Alpujarra region almost six months ago. For the first month we had rented a small self-contained holiday apartment, part of a very attractive complex called ´El Cercado´, where we had stayed on two previous visits to the area. The idea was to find ourselves a place to rent as a base whilst continuing the search for Shangri La. The cats had stayed behind in the Follyfoot cattery in Westfield and were due to fly out to Granada a month later by which time, we had anticipated, we would be in long - term rental accommodation more suited to housing two felines. (Anybody who would like more information on how to get pets over to Spain, let me know and I´ll be pleased to give you further details. It was, eventually, a lot easier than it first appeared but you need to know where to turn, which I certainly didn´t when I began.) As planned, therefore, we found ourselves a place to rent: the lower floor of a recently refurbished house in the village of Bérchules (allegedly the third highest village in Spain) with a little vegetable garden which we thought would be the perfect place for our two cats to enjoy the fresh mountain air (more details another time). The house was directly behind the village church (funny how we never appreciated the full significance of this) and next to a little shop, a real Aladdin´s cave, run by our landlady´s daughter. Our two furry friends finally arrived safely and soon settled into their new home.
There then followed a short but painful (in every sense of the word) spell of mishaps and we started to wonder if somebody was trying to tell us something. Our car was severely damaged whilst parked in the church square but the culprit didn´t leave a note, just a badly dented tailgate and smashed rear window for us to sort out. Ian had a bad fall during a walk in the mountains and sliced open his arm which subsequently needed four stitches, inserted swiftly, efficiently – and without anaesthetic. I fell down a steep slope in the village (not looking where I was going) and hurt my finger and ankle. One of our cats went down with a bad cold and had to be taken to the vet. The same cat, having fully recovered, then went missing for several hours and was eventually located in an abandoned house next door. We had to rescue her by knocking down the extremely solid front door which had been locked for many years.
Worse was to come. Ian discovered that his minor problems of blood pressure were not helped at all by living at this altitude (1300 m) and felt quite unwell, so much so that we eventually decided that we should probably start looking around for another, lower, area in which to live. On one of our trips to explore a new area we both fell ill with severe food poisoning and were so poorly that we had to call out the emergency medical services. None of these incidents put us off living in Spain though, remarkably.
Ian, in the meantime, has been to see a specialist about his blood pressure and heart rate and was prescribed different medication which has made a big difference to his general well-being. Even though he copes with the altitude much better now, we nevertheless decided that the beautiful but fairly remote Alpujarras aren´t for us after all. The area is great for a walking holiday but not practical on a day-to-day basis (a return trip to our dentist, for example, involves two hours of driving). We continued investigating different areas within Andalucía and after a few dead-ends, we have finally discovered an area in the Málaga province, called Sierra de las Nieves, which we really like. Last weekend we signed a six-month rental contract and the four of us will move into ´our´ very nice detached finca in the countryside on 10th April. We shall miss the Alpujarras and the many acquaintances and friends we have made but we´re both looking forward to moving on.
Enough for today. Hasta luego.
xxx