A One-Way Journey?

We are going to be driving down to our new home at the end of September.

We have hired a one-way van, collecting it from Kent, loading it up at home, getting the ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao and then driving through Spain.  After unloading the van at home, we drop it off at Malaga, which all seems like such a great idea!  Our adventure starts the minute we leave London, and the drive will take us through Spanish heartlands that neither of us has seen - night-stopping in Segovia and then Jaen before the final leg to our village.

We have already had a dry run in our new home.  The owner kindly let us stay for a week in April to get used to how the place works, and for us to make a list of items we might need to bring with us.  It is a glorious place!  It feels like home; a higgledy-piggledy house formed from two old cottages, and now with three lovely bedrooms and three bathrooms, a small pool, and several terraces and balconies.  There are two sitting rooms, one of which has an open fire for the chilly winter nights.  This is a place that we can call home, and where we can have our friends and family to stay and use as a base for sharing this amazing part of Spain.  It is a place where we feel we can cook, and explore new ways of cooking with ingredients bought fresh from local markets and the horn-blowing van that drives into the village square early in the morning. We have already had the watercolours out, and the countryside that surrounds us is so photogenic that it is almost impossible not to take a stunning photograph, even with nothing more than a mobile phone.

There is also a sense of relief that we do not yet own this, or any other house in Spain.  I think we will need to year to uncover the vagaries and foibles of running a home in Spain before we take the plunge permanently, should we so decide to do.