First Days

Well first the dogs were off with strangers in a big van, Bertie on his own & the littlies together. Then another van arrived to take the spa tub & a big blind, another van from a charity came to take our excess furniture & suddenly the house seemed empty.


Early Monday morning my wife got on a plane & then I was totally alone.

What is going on? you ask, well, I have taken a slightly earlier retirement than originally planned & decided that we couldn't face another British 9 month winter & are moving, lock stock & 5 smoking dogs to Spain.
Not too easy a decision as neither of us are much beyond ordering a cerveza or cafe con leche grande level in speaking the language (for some reason I keep reverting to French!)
I closed up the office, then sold it, sold the car & then the fun started, fortunately Mrs D had already packed a lot in boxes so when the van arrived on Wednesday night I was ready, thursday didn't quite go to plan, the van had a flat tyre so off to Loughborough & discovered two needed replacing, then back to the house & loading commenced.
What a lot of decisions had to be made as the van wasn't quite big enough, had to leave a tool box, some air coolers & a couple of gas heaters but managed to keep one cooler, a brand new one.

Worst of all was a box marked "Shoes & shit", I pulled out the vacuum packed clothes & squeezed those in but forgot the shoes, Mrs D still hasn't forgiven me for that yet, not sure she ever will.

What can I say about the 1400 mile journey?  Well in the UK it rained, but we did see some beautiful rainbows. We got to the ferry a bit early & managed to change the time so were able to go that night instead of waiting until 5 O'Clock the next day which was nice, got into France in the early hours & bought Diesel (goodness it's cheaper over here, less than a euro per litre !) & then we were off, stopped for breakfast at a service station & lunch at a picnic area, very nice.
We used the autoroutes which was fast but a bit pricey & I managed to get shouted at when I drove through a low headroom booth, totally forgetting all the stuff on the roof rack & broke some signs, whoops, fortunately the barrier came up & I drove off, wasn't chased so must of been OK.

Finally got to Spain & oddly enough it was overcast, I turned to my co-driver & told him to go back, I didn't come to Spain for weather like this !
Again we used the fast routes & drove right through the centre of Madrid, on a Motorway, very cool.
Now we were tooling along at a great pace & then disaster struck, A blowout on a rear tyre (we had replaced both front ones in the UK), The spare turned out to be a 165/13 when all the others were 175/13 so the van didn't handle quite so well after that.

We finally got to the house in Andalucia in the early hours and at that point we had both been up for over 40 hours & the last few miles (should I now say kilometers?) we were hallucinating a bit & singing (badly) to each other to stay awake & alert.
But now we are here, unloaded the van next day (you can't really park for long outside the house, it's a village house on a very narrow street) & just dumped everything in the two spare bedrooms.
A week in and we have internet so no longer need the dongle, TV (Filmon.tv is brilliant) and with the pictures up, it's now looking more like our home. The dogs are settling in well & I will continue this as the New life progresses.