‘I must remember to sit down and write the
blog’ ‘don’t let me forget to sit down and wrote the blog’ ‘shit, I really have
to sit down and write the bloody blog..’
Ok, so it’s been ages since we’ve had the
chance to update our pictorial and worded travel diary. This is partly due to laziness, having
lots of other interesting stuff to do or a series of hilarious run-ins with our
local Spanish internet shop which appears to have the gravitational pull of
Hattie Jacques and has exerted such a Toulon-like grip upon me that I had find
it impossible to avoid entering and have another fall-out with the
proprietor – he really is a disagreeable chap and sold us a lie god dammit – so
I enjoy our little get-togethers.
Anyway, after a few ‘discussions’ we have finally
sorted out a net connection that isn’t powered by the local donkey and that
allows us sufficient GB’s to kick-start our blog again. Apologies to our four Caribbean readers
about the lack of recent broadcasts but we’re back on air now so hook yourself
up a hammock, grab a can of Lilt and join us as we continue our journey through
space and time….ok then, just France and Spain.
We left off waaaaaay back in mid-October, as we
were just about to carry out a load of second viewings of property dotted across
Brittany and in differing states of repair. We viewed countless property the first time around remaining
open minded about all we looked at, despite condition or location, and found
some lovely property in the wrong location or a dog of a house in favoured
location, but nothing felt quite right.
Anyway, we whittled it down to a few decent ruins in our favoured location
of south-eastern Brittany and headed out to see them again.
Before we go into how we got on something that
we both began to feel as we spent more time in Brittany was that, as lovely as
it is, it can feel a bit too quaint and quiet (especially coming from the mean
streets of E’Dwich) and what we’d originally set out to find ‘wow, look at all
this peace and space’ became a little bit ‘shit, look at all this peace and space’. France – and Brittany in particular - feels
like a perfectly safe and decent place to live, everything seems nice, quiet,
clean, pretty damn near perfect… a bit like the Truman Show. There just doesn’t appear to be
that extra something exciting that we have found in so many other places
present in Brittany. But property
is cheap, the countryside is really nice in parts and the people we’ve met have
always been extremely friendly to us.
This has left us just mulling over if we
would/could permanently live there, and we’re still not sure of that right now.
We met a really decent bloke who was around the same age as me (still young, full
of verve) who had moved to Brittany sometime ago, set up his own property
investment company and was trying to sell us a house. He took us around a few houses, really helpful, telling us
why each one was the perfect investment opportunity for us and we all got on
well so we took him for a coffee after completing our viewings.
No sooner had we sat down when he was suddenly
like ‘look, I’m trying to sell you a house and all but do you REALLY wanna live
here?’ and went on to explain how he’d moved out for the ‘better quality of
life’ more space etc but that the remoteness/rural life nature & lack of
City hustle and bustle can be very hard to adjust to, so he said he was moving his
family further south and that we should give serious consideration to our plan
of moving lock-stock to Brittany as it can be a little sleepy (not his exact
words). Either the best, or worst,
Estate Agent going. Good man.
We’d also seen evidence of the risk of buying
property and moving abroad in the form of a lot of half-renovated incomplete
‘dreams’ that owners were now trying to sell or property that had been bought
from the UK and just left to rot, not something we want to end up with and
doesn’t endear you to the local community.
Anyway, with all that in mind the properties
that we went to see for a second visit turned out to be just too far away from
life for us, too rural or in small hamlets with not much going on so we ruled
them all out. We’ve not searched
for or bought property before but something happened to us during our search
that I guess a lot of people experience; we found ourselves comparing
everything against the very first place that we viewed and that we had found
on-line whilst still in the UK, the mighty Lignol! Not only did we find ourselves talking about it but also
we’d find ourselves visiting it, again and again, countless times like it was
our own. It’s not, but we want it to be.
So after an extensive search and a long drive back up from Italy to
Brittany we’ve picked the very first one we saw over 12 months ago (luckily for us
there has been four failed purchase attempts to date by others so it’s still
available).
Awesome ruin it is, set into some lovely land
and not too far from both the nearest small and decent sized town. Anyone reading this (including the four
Caribbeans) will hopefully discover all this anyway, as you will be helping
re-build it. There’s not the
business opportunity we were looking for at the site, yet, but there could be
potential to expand in the future and even though it’s not ours we do get that
feeling of coming ‘home’ when we visit it. Just most homes don’t have trees growing in the lounge. So, easy part done, identifying the
property we want, now we have the very difficult process of trying to actually
make it ours by having an impending offer accepted and securing a modest French
renovation mortgage, not as easy as getting hold of cash in the UK and a blog
entry of its own. Who knows if we
will actually live there in the future, just getting it re-built will be enough
to start with. However, anyone reading this (including the four Carribeans)
will be expected to put us up for a while in April if none of this comes off,
could go either way as it stands today.
Right, with that partly sorted it was time to
leave Brittany and follow the sensible birds and retired cock-er-nees down to
southern Spain for winter and to the house so kindly donated to us by Wendy and
Graham. Located in the village of Acequias, not far from Granada in Andalucia,
and at about 900m altitude up the side of the Sierra Nevada it’s a great place
to head to for winter!!
Up to this point we’d done so much driving, so
much travelling and spent so much time in the van that we decided to blast down
to southern Spain as quickly as possible, sometimes at terrifying speeds close
to 55mph. Also, with the northern
European weather beginning to turn on us and the relative sanctuary of open
campsites with warm showers now few and far between we couldn’t wait to get to
Acequias.
So, not much to tell you about the trip down
other than we passed through:
Biarritz - great looking place, even on a cloudy
day – full of trust-fund receiving surfers.
San Sebastian - awesome place to visit,
brilliant city in stunning setting – full of trust-fund givers and an elderly
community not unlike that in the film Cocoon.
Other than some place in the middle of Spain
that was it for major stops on our journey south, we really went for it and the
bus is none to happy with us for it.
It’s a shame that we missed a lot of Spain on the trip down – although
the middle drive from north to south is a pretty monotonous stretch of
nothingness, nothing but whole loads of nothing, save a few ropey industrial
looking places – but once we get settled we plan to head out and explore more, we also wanted to save something for the journey back north next year (if
we don’t just keep heading south).
Arriving at Acequias was brilliant. Mainly because the van took a beating
on the way down, we’d really pushed it, but also because we’d been looking forward
to the comforts of living in a proper solid structure ever since the summer
ended and the great European rains of 2012 arrived. Naturally, because we’d spent the best part of seven months
in our awesome van and now needed to adjust to living in a house (we tried to
drive it to BP and fill it up with diesel but we can’t get it started, engine
trouble we suspect..) it felt a bit weird getting out of the bus knowing it
would be for quite a while. We
also had the slightly unnerving sight of the lovely local Spanish mama’s lining up to stare through the windows
at us for the first week or so, must be a local custom or something,
but they are all proper old mama types, very umm, ‘curious’ for want of a
better word but also very welcoming.
We arrived at the house quite late at night and
a bit disorientated so preceded to get well smashed on cheap Rioja and
rum. Banging headaches we stumbled
out onto the roof terrace the next morning to be met with a fantastic panoramic
view of the valley that we find ourselves right next to, the Sierra Nevada
mountains and farther beyond to distant villages. It looks like a great place to spend time.
In return for the kind loan of the property we
are undertaking some repairs so have spent our first week at the house doing
one or two jobs, getting to know our immediate surroundings and just relaxing
into relaxing, all the while looking up at the mountains wondering how great it
will be to walk them, getting excited about getting out into the local
community more, cycling the challenging looking roads and maybe even heading to
the beach, in November. We also
need to source combustible material and get to grips with our wood burner as we
suspect it could get cold around here.
More of which will be posted in a less shoddy time
frame in the next week (or so).
Hasta bloody Luego!
