27.07.21 – How did I get here?
Here I am, living and working as a self-employed person (called autonomo) in southern Spain.
But why and how did I get here? It’s probably best to give you a little bit of a background as to how I got here…..sit tight, I will try to make it as brief as I can!
I was a Senior General Manager for Stonegate Pub Company – I had worked for the company for many years, but I was falling out of love with the late nights, drunk people and working every weekend.
Don’t get me wrong, without having fallen into the hospitality industry I would never have met my husband and the other awesome people I worked with, and I enjoyed many years working my way up and running clubs and pubs full of people. I even met a few Z list celebrities! But like all good things, it felt like it had to come to an end.
In 2014 I found out that for whatever reason (and I still don’t fully know why), I am unable to have children. It was a really hard time, I ended up taking time off from work and having myself a little breakdown. It was while I was off that I decided I just couldn’t face doing that job any more and with the support of my husband I quit my job at the end of 2014.
That led to me starting my own Pet Services business which mostly involved dog walking and pop in visits and some dog home boarding. I love dogs and thought this would make me happy.
I enjoyed it to start with, but it became quite stressful – have you ever walked other people’s dogs?? – and the drop in income was HUGE. My poor husband was working hard as usual, but we had way less money, couldn’t afford to go away on holiday anymore (which used to really help him reset and de-stress from work) and in the end it meant we couldn’t even afford our mortgage!
When it got to that point, we decided to downsize and move, staying as local as we could, and reducing our mortgage to as little as possible. We had been sensible in the past when we were earning good money, and always paid off more of the mortgage each year than needed.
So, we found somewhere we liked and in January 2018 we moved in.
We didn’t really settle there, my husband hated it, and things weren’t great.
The outcome of this was that at the beginning of May, my husband had a suspected heart attack, and we decided then and there that we needed to do something drastic and moving abroad was one option.
We had toyed with moving abroad in the past, we nearly went to New Zealand many years before and we had ideas about Fiji previously, and even contemplated Asia this time around, but due to having 2 dogs and the hassle of relocating somewhere tropical and far away, we settled on Spain, as south as possible!
The house went on the market (we’d only been there 6 months!) and we started to plan our new lives.
Knowing we had to go soon due to the dreaded Brexit and all the complications that would bring, we did lots of research, planned to travel around Spain for a few months checking out different areas to see where we might want to live, and booked some places to stay.
We had to put a lot of stuff in storage that we would eventually ship over when we were settled somewhere, loaded the car absolutely full of boxes of stuff, my husbands’ weights (!!) some gym equipment and 2 dogs and off we went.
This was at the beginning of September 2018- we started with a night in a local New Forest pub, headed to Eastbourne to see some friends and then got the Eurotunnel at Folkestone and headed to France.
We had a night booked at a hotel in Paris so spent a lovely day walking around with the dogs and seeing as many things as we could.
Next stop was a few nights in Barcelona – a place we both really love – and had another lovely few days with the dogs walking around the city.
From here we headed to our first month long stop, but that’s for another time…..