A trip into the Unknown!! written by Maria-Elena Heed

A TRIP TO THE UNKNOWN! 

It all changed, one dark, cold winter’s evening when I came home exhausted from a busy day at work. It was the first day of enrolment for our postgraduate students at the University. 

I was glad Chris was cooking dinner. I changed into a more comfortable attire and sat down for a while in front of the television. I turned on the channel news to know what was happening around the world till dinner was ready.

 “Dinner is on the table”, he shouted out half an hour later. 

We sat around the table and I said: ”go on tell me what news d’you have, I'm really dying to know”

 “Well, I've been looking at houses in France and Spain and their prices and perhaps the possibility of us living abroad”

I was stunned by this revelation. It wouldn’t have crossed my mind for one second that he would propose to live in another country. We had been watching, for a few months ‘Living in the Sun’ and most probably that’s where his dream all began. 

He'd been looking at houses and their prices, and Spain seemed the favourable place to move to, more than France. The Spanish language being a plus as Spanish is my mother language, though French was always my preferred language although a bit rusty but fluency of a language comes with practice right?!

After dinner he said: “Let's go to the computer room to show you the houses” …

His project sounded adventurous and exciting. Besides, at that time the University where I worked was going through some drastic administrative changes by the new Dean. I felt that my position was in a predicament. It made sense to make changes with our lives and so we began to plan our journey. 

As life has it, we encountered so many obstacles on the way which indicated moving to another country was not on the cards and perhaps the universe had other plans for us. However our resilience was stronger than our obstacles so we continued with our plans and followed the dream. 

By December 2015 we put our house for sale and sooner than expected the house was sold. We made a trip to Spain to view houses in the Almeria province and found a place in a quiet hamlet in Arboleas. Before we knew, we were making an offer on the house we viewed. 

We went back to the UK to start the paperwork of selling and buying houses, lawyers, hiring a firm to move the furniture, deciding what to take and what to leave behind and setting up a date for the big move. 

Unfortunately, I had an imminent trip to Brussels which I had no choice but to postpone travelling with Chris to Spain. Consequently, Chris’s friend Richard, with whom we're forever in debt, offered to drive up to Spain with Chris and our beloved Westie, ‘Stinka’.

Their journey began by driving up to Portsmouth, crossed the channel and arrived at Bilbao, then all the way across to Arboleas to our new abode, on the 15 March 2016, eight years ago today!