Adios Espana

Firstly thank you all for your kind comments and emails. It’s been a difficult few days – Scott’s Grandad is ill in hospital and after lots of telephone conversations to the UK we have made the decision to drive back to England to spend Christmas as a family.

This situation has highlighted to us the importance of not being too far from family when we settle and one of the main reasons we have earmarked France as a possible contender to live permanently is precisely for that reason. Being here in the South of Spain may not seem that far, but when you throw a dog into the equation, flying makes things difficult. We don’t want to leave Milla in a kennel for too long and how long would we need? It’s open-ended when it comes to wanting to spend time with family at a difficult time. The only way is for us all to return together, which means a long drive – we think about 5 days with stops. If it was just the two of us we would just share the driving and keep going, but with a little one it’s not that easy to do that. Obviously the decision was easy. As soon as we heard the news we knew we wanted to be there, but it really has confirmed that when we do settle, it won’t be far from the UK. We both love travel and our future plans (money allowing!) include lots of ideas: driving across Scandinavia, driving the Rockies in Canada etc etc, but one thing we now know for sure; there is no way we could put down roots too far from our family.

As I sit here with the fire crackling and the sound of the village church bells in the distance, I feel sad that our stay here has come to an end. The experience we have had is better than anything we imagined and we have learnt so much, not least about living a simpler life. Being here in this community has taught us that you really don’t need a lot to get by if you have a patch of land to grow food, wood to put on your fire and each other. And that’s the thing; here we see how family-orientated people are and in our hearts there is now only one place we need to be right now and that is with our family.



So, we now start the preparations of packing up and embarking on the long drive back as quickly as we can. Needless to say no posts for a while! And despite the circumstances we are looking forward to a Christmas at home before we embark on the next part of our journey to France.