Our new life in spain

Chapter 3 - Thoughts on moving with Hindsight
Monday, November 8, 2010

I would not recommend anyone to move themselves to Spain I certainly wouldn’t do it again by ourselves (silly me we don’t have to we’re already here & it’s great) Sorry got side tracked.

I did do some research before leaving the UK and the prices quoted for being moved were horrendous and there also didn’t seem to be very much choice. I now realise that there are plenty of people with vans based in Spain who regularly go back and forth to the UK and charge a very reasonable rate for bring over your goods and chattels. Their adverts can be found in the free newspaper Sur in English.

This brings me nicely to the return of the deposit on the van we hired. This was due to be returned to us by the 28^th April’10. After many many emails, phone calls & promises to pay we finally had to threaten them with a denuncia. Very interesting to find out what you have to do in Spain if someone owes you money as in my previous life in the UK I used to work in debt recovery.

Anyway to end the story we finally got our deposit back 24 weeks late.

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Chapter 2 Moving in
Friday, October 29, 2010

Arriving around 11am at our new home there was no time to take a rest due to it being Easter at the weekend we had to have the van we had hired one way back by Thursday instead of Friday.

Our house is accessible down a rather churned up track so we had park the van at the top, empty out our car and then over the next day and half make numerous trips with the car collecting our bits and pieces from the van. Sounds simple but when you have a property with no flat areas outside and a large overgrown ‘garden’ not to mention that to get from the car to the front door you had to go right round the house up and down slopes of concrete, grass and a few obstacles. As you can imagine by Wed evening we were exhausted and many pounds lighter, not the ideal way to lose weight but effective. I had also fallen while carrying a large box so was sporting a very uncomfortable sore elbow. While we were doing all this fetching and carrying we had the presence of mind to wear back supports. They were worth their weight in gold. With us both having been working in ‘sit down’ jobs neither of us was very fit.

On Thursday we headed off in convoy again to return the Van to the office in Torre del Mar.A much better trip with the van being empty. It was a relief to return it.

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Moving to Spain
Thursday, October 21, 2010

Our journey begins sailing at 4.30.pm from Plymouth to Santander . Driving our car I was first on board & we had arranged to meet in our cabin only one problem Phil driving our hired van!!! (another story ) had the ticket which had the card key for the room, anyway my luck was in as a very kind French gentleman kindly opened up the cabin for me.

Once Phil eventually arrived on board we set about exploring the boat, it was huge good thing there were lifts everywhere even some ‘see through’ ones. I had been very worried about the journey across as I don’t travel very well on boats but as it was I needn’t have worried as we had the smoothest crossing possible.

We disembarked about 2pm with no problems and started our long drive south. Phil took the lead as it was easier for him to set the speed with the van.

The weather was good all be it windy and although it was motorway all the way the wind did cause a few problems for the van on the very mountainous roads and viaducts in northern Spain. We had a couple of coffee stops and refuelled before arriving early evening north of Madrid. We decided to carry on and get round Madrid before stopping for the night. We had got talking on one of our coffee stops to a couple who frequently drove down to southern Spain and they had advised us the best way to get past Madrid ,good thing they did as although seemed to be the long way round it was quite straightforward although at one point I thought we were going to end up in Valencia, but that’s Spanish road signs for you.

Once past Madrid we looked for a suitable place to stop I think we tried to come off the motorway 3 times to get to the services only to end up going nowhere and having to turn round and carry on back on the motorway. I was getting very tired by now so overtook the van (our signal that I wanted to stop) and pulled off at the next junction. This took us to a roundabout for the new toll road and a couple of unmade roads. On one of these we stopped and settled to sleep in our driving seats. It was a good thing we did stop as the heavens opened and the wind roared but we managed to doze on and off for about 5 hours. Feeling a lot better we set off again and pulled in to the next ‘services’ we came to a bar/restaurant and had a lovely Spanish cup of coffee the only other clients that early in the morning were a couple of Guardia Civil having a beer.

We set off once again with the end in sight and made good progress through Jaen and Granada and finally getting to Motril and on familiar roads. We finally arrived at our new home at 11.30 am Tues.

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