Is this happening or not?

I’m sat on the long ferry home from our research trip to North Spain, with lazy waves rolling past the window beside me. There’s a few hours until we dock and the children are watching Frozen II on the maritime wifi service. So I thought I’d write down where we’ve got to.

We came out to Spain to settle a question. Do we really want to do this? Do we really want to uproot ourselves from our comfortable lives in Bournemouth and move to Spain, putting the children in new schools where they don’t understand the language, and where we don’t know a soul? Or is this just a dream, an idea seeded by too much watching A New Life in the Sun, but not something we really want to do? We figured the only way to know for sure was to go there. To look at the schools, to see the types of home we might be able to afford and get a real feel for the place. And then ask: ‘is this where we really want to live?’

But behind this were other questions too. Could we do it? What impact would covid have on things? What about Brexit, which removed the automatic right of myself and the kids to live in Spain? Could we take the dog? Probably more important, given how much of the idea was based upon the stark difference in property prices between Bournemouth and north Spain – could we really sell our house for anything like the eye-watering sum the estate agents were promising us?

The last week has passed in a blur trying to find some answers. We’ve viewed dozens of houses, been shown around schools, and we spent a good amount of time visiting the various beaches, to see which ones we prefer (priorities, right?). We took a trip up to the mountains, to take the kids sledging, and we sat in a lot of restaurants, sampling the food and surreptitiously spying on the natives, to see if they were our kind of people or not. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, but I think I’m able to provide some answers now.

The plan was to sit down on the ferry home for the very-important-family-meeting to make the big decision. Are we going to do this or not? Well, we’ve just done so, but it was more of a formality than a momentous moment. We’d all enjoyed ourselves. We’d all been able to picture ourselves there, at least for a few years. Rafa has discovered a deep love of bocadillo de lomo con queso (that’s a sort of sandwich with pork chop and melted cheese, it’s pretty good). And sledging. We all knew it was going to be a yes.

So we’re going for it…

That’s the big news. What we didn’t expect was for things to move so fast. The intention was to view a few houses to get an idea of what our budget might buy. But we were strict with each other – don’t fall in love with anything, because it’ll definitely be gone by the time we’ve come home, put our house on the market and found a buyer. Well, you can probably guess what went wrong there. We fell in love with a house.

We called it Woof Woof house (all the houses we viewed got given nicknames to help us tell them apart, and this one had a German Shepard dog that had somehow managed to photobomb every one of the estate agent’s pictures). And it’s gorgeous, both dog and house. It’s a detached house, in the countryside but in a little community of other homes, near the little town of Suances, about a mile back from the coast. It has a little bit of land around it, and a coop to keep chickens. I could go on, but I really shouldn’t because, as I say it’ll be gone by the time we’re ready to put an offer in.

Except, there’s a weird b-story to this plot. Back home in the UK, and a couple of weeks ago, our neighbour’s house went up for sale. It’s a near-identical house to ours, and such is the demand for people moving to Bournemouth, that it attracted lots of viewings. And we happened to recognise one couple who came to view next door. They were friends of ours from the children’s school, whom we knew had been looking for a house for some time. We half-jokingly said they might be able to buy ours if we decided on the move. You can probably guess where this is going…

To cut a long story short, and since I shouldn’t go into too much detail here – after all it’s early stages, and I’m not just telling our story here – we ended up getting an offer on our house without even needing to put it on the market. And hence we’ve now put an offer ourselves on Woof Woof house. It’s been accepted. Gulp.

So it seems that it’s not only happening, but it’s happening a whole lot quicker than we expected. Double gulp.

I’m actually off the boat now – it turned out the maritime wifi wasn’t really good enough to post this on the internet (OK, I got sucked into Frozen II). And since getting home I got distracted by the small mountain of solicitor’s forms, visa applications, passport renewals, dog vaccinations and international removals quotes, and renewed interest in Duolingo Spanish classes that have suddenly jumped to the head of my to-do list. But we’re now getting to the stage where the lawyers take over the bulk of the work and we can sit back and dream of the upcoming adventure without having to do much. At least, that’s what I assume is about to happen.

Nothing is yet a done deal, but all appears to be on track for a move sometime in late Spring this year. I’ll keep you informed!

In the meantime however I do want to say one final thing. In my last email I asked for readers to send stories of the adventures they’ve had, to give us the courage to press on with this. I usually try to respond individually to every email, but it was never going to happen this time. However I still wanted to say a general thank you to everyone that took the time to write. We read every email and there were some amazing stories, many of adventures far more daring than the one we’re undertaking. But what came through time and time again was that life is short, and nobody seemed to regret giving things a try, even if they hadn’t gone exactly to plan. It really did mean a lot to get such a response, and it was hugely influential to us making the decision to go for it. So thank you.

I’ve added a few photos from our research trip. Thank you so much for reading and now I’m going to get back to doing a little bit of writing. I suspect time will be at a bit of a premium in the weeks to come…

Gregg