The Journey Part 1 - Leaving London

I am writing this retrospectively, now that we have arrived at our home for the next year, so this is a bit of a memory of our journey from the UK to Andalusia.  Not particularly groundbreaking, you may think, but to us it was the real start of our adventure.  Surprisingly, it will went to plan!

After a fair bit of planning (actually, quite detailed planning!) the morning of the move arrived.  I had to whizz down to Swanley in Kent to collect the van, and this might well have put many people off - a transaction on the road outside a car mechanic’s garage, and a van with 250,000 miles on the clock and fair amount of driver-related wear and tear.  This was not luxury by any means, but I reasoned that as long as it got us down to southern Spain, all would be well.  The problem as that I had concerns that this van might not even get us to Portsmouth!

Slight issue number 2 was that we had yet to find a tenant for our London home, and this was a rather integral part of the financial plan.  We were so busy, packing and saying goodbyes, that the possible implications of an empty London property and no rental income remained on the fringe of our activities.

So, van collected, boxes loaded and cleaners in to do a ‘deep clean’ = chaos!  And just the perfect time for the letting agent to pitch up with prospective tenants!  The flat was full of people: us, the cleaners, the agent, prospective tenants and one of their mothers.  Amazingly, and at the 11th hour, these people saw through the moving day mess and decided they’d like to rent it.