Retiring types? Not us!

Our Spanish friend likes to use the phrase "more or less"  (sometimes "mas or menos") and in July 2008 I had some good news, more or less.  This made a pleasant change from receiving bad news about our property at Santa Ana del Monte and our chances (almost nil!) of getting our money back.  I had entered a writing contest run by NativeSpain website, and they were offering me a publishing contract.   No need to tell you that I was very excited!

Well as I said it wasn't entirely good news: I had written my book with separate chapters covering different topics, such as viewing trips, contractual issues (especially bank guarantees!), food and drink, fiestas etc.  My editor Debs wanted the book written in chronological order, telling my personal story of retiring to Spain with John, so almost a total rewrite was required and we were expecting our first visitors to arrive in a week's time.  We also had to find a new home before our rental contract ran out at the end of the year and one thing we had already learnt since moving to Spain was that everything takes time - usually twice as long as you would expect it to take.  Luckily I am a dab hand at using "cut and paste", and there were lots of anecdotes in my original book that could be incorporated into the new one, but it was still a daunting task.  I thanked my lucky stars though for the flexibility nowadays when using a PC rather than an old-fashioned typewriter.

I didn't have much time to worry about my book, as John's daughter Sarah arrived with her husbnd Jerry and their four sons Simon, Joshua, Adam and Elliott.  We took advantage of their stay by visiting Murcia, Alicante, Cieza and Calasparra with them.  It would have been rude to have stayed at home writing, wouldn't it?  I would have plenty of time after they returned to the UK.

Before they left, we asked the boys what they thought of Spain.  Simon announced that he liked everything, apart from the strawberry jam.  Hey, Simon, who chose the strawberry jam?  Josh summed it up for the rest of them: "Spain is wicked!".

Now I had time to continue the rewrite: if Debs is reading this, I immediately got down to work! (I won't mention that August had arrived and we had lots of fiestas in town).  Of course I can put it down to the need to research the next book.....

John and I have been living in Jumilla for just over a year, and have had some amazing experiences during the last twelve months.  Where to start?  I suppose the beginning would be the best idea!

When we signed a rental contract in April 2008, it was in the expectation that we would move permanently to Jumilla after John retired two months' later, and that by the end of December we would be living in our new house on a golf development at Residencial Santa Ana del Monte, a few miles outside Jumilla.  We should have been living there since January 2008, however the builders were behind schedule although our agents told us there was nothing to worry about........!  Looking back we were a bit naive - no doubt many of you are now nodding your heads at that statement.

In May 2008 I received a text from Heather, a fellow buyer, saying that the developer San Jose had gone into voluntary administration.  We were on holiday in Spain at the time, so we looked for an internet cafe and logged onto the Eye on Spain community forum to try and get more information.  Unfortunately the bad news was true - and to make it worse, we didn't have a bank guarantee to protect our 38,000 euro deposit - so it looked like Plan A was going out of the window.

In June 2008, after a champagne send-off with my three children at St Pancras International Station, John and I travelled by train from London to Murcia, with two large bulging suitcases each, ready to start our new life in Spain in the apartment we were renting.  We knew that we needed to start thinking about Plan B.

We looked into the implications of the administration process, which we were aware could take a very long time (we are talking about Spain, after all!) and realised that we had an important decision to make: should we stay in Spain or should we give notice to our landlord that we were cancelling the rental contract and return to London?    It took us a long time to reach a decision (all of 2 seconds) so all we had to do now was find somewhere else to buy, preferably somewhere with a roof on. 

We cursed San Jose, we cursed our agents who had recommended the development and we cursed our solicitor who had let us pay the money for the deposit without mentioning that we should by law have a bank guarantee to protect our deposit in the unlikely event of things going wrong.  The unlikely event had happened and we were now looking for a new home in Spain with a restricted budget.  The only things we didn't curse were the sunshine, the friendly local people and the good wine.

So what was the good news?