…. we are about to move. At the end of August just before we sold Mineral House,we were shortlisting what we were looking for in our house in Spain and were convinced that a farmhouse, with a few acres, near to a village etc etc was what we were going to look for. So it with a little suprise that on the 18th August I found myself in Spain looking at two houses, which were patently extremely different to what we were certain we were looking for – and it is one of these that we are now moving to. A large town house, well village house I suppose. It has 5 out buildings which are going to be turned into work shops.
The new house is in Villagarcia De La Torre www.villagarciadelatorre.com. To translate this try http://babelfish.altavista.com/ stick the entire web address after the http:// (where it says translate web page) select ‘Spanish to English’ and away you go! Some pics are here www.kaffi.co.uk/spain.
After a couple of false starts we are heading off, and our plans are beginning to fall into place.
Last week, we bought a van. It is a transit van and as of Thursday is still running. We have taken out RAC cover so all we need to ensure is that it gets us to Spain and if it turns up its wheels then we are covered for onward travel (last thing we would want would be the nice RAC man to take us, dogs and Davy back top the UK trailing the broken van). The van is a transit long wheel base on a short wheel thing – well something like that anyway. But hey, it’s blue.
We’re heading off on Boxing Day. We’ve had to get a crossing from Dover to Calias. A bit of a pain in the neck as we had hoped for a longer corssing, but there are limited animal places available on these, so we were very limited. We need to be there for the 30th as everything shuts the following week. So although it is a shorter crossing, we’ll be able to drive part of the way on Monday and will probably sleep better in the van than we would on the ferry anyway. The dogs will probably appreciate the shorter crossing.
The furniture is there – Ian went over 2/12th to take delivery of our furniture, so we are only taking basics and the things we have amassed over the last few months. As we both exhibited self control in not buying a floor loom we saw on Ebay, this is a lot less than it could have been.
So what is left to do? We need to get the phone unlocked so we can put a Spanish network card in, we need to get post redirected (although why we are bothering escapes me – the Post Office have taken it on themselves to ignore our last redirection request, which is bad enough, but they now randomly sending us post from people in Carlisle, we thought perhaps we’d just leave it up to them to distribute our post where they like). The Volvo went this morning, it went ‘free to collector’ which is a bit sad as we had a brand new tow bar put on it.
We will have to spend another evening in the dark, hiding behind the sofa. We are experiencing somehting we’ve not before – carol singers! They never bothered before, but even Basil joining in doesn’t seem to put them off…
Don’t forget the seasick tablets, the camp beds and the spanish dictionary.
Have you warned Extremadura to expect you? Perheps they hav’nt seen a blue long wheelbase whatyoucallit van full of dogs before!