Things had really started to heat up here. The hay meadows have all been cut, the grass drying in the sun before being baled for winter feed. Anna and I had started to swelter in the heat, we had been doing our gardening either first thing in the morning or (more often) in the evening. The days were spent indoors looking wistfully out the window at the heat haze in the valley. Finally though the weather broke with a couple of huge storms. The rain came down in sheets and there were some amazing lightning displays across the hillside. We were worried for our newly planted beetroots and carrots, but the little seedlings coped remarkably well.

Good for the plants!

Moody

Our friend Jo came to visit for a couple of days. Richard and Suzanne kindly offered to let Jo sleep in the big house, which is a beautifully kept old building and which Jo loved. Unfortunately her love for it couldn’t overcome her fear of unexplained noises in the night, so I ended up sleeping in there while Anna and Jo stayed in the apartment. Best couple of nights’ sleep I’ve had for ages! The ghosts were very well behaved.

We spent a lot of our time with Jo chatting and catching up at the apartment. When you have good food and good company there’s not much need to go anywhere! We did manage a little trip to Mogrovejo, one of the loveliest of the many lovely villages here, where we talked over our plans and further analysed the bizarre happenings at Mazo de Mon! We also did a bit of gardening for Suzanne and Richard as a token attempt to say thanks for letting all our mates stay over! In no time we found ourselves waving goodbye to Jo at the bus station in Unquera as she headed to Santander for her flight home.

Over the weekend we went for another walk. After last week’s expedition we decided on a nice short waymarked path, the Ruta Bajo los Picos (The Route Under the Picos). It started and ended in Mogrovejo, following cart tracks up towards the huge rock face that marks the start of the national park.From there we circled around, crossing a lovely little river and heading back down to town on the other side of the river valley.

Surveying the boundary of the Picos

Heading home

On Monday we went to the local Ayuntamiento (town hall) to get ourselves registered at the apartment. This is the first step towards residency. Since the UK is now apparently leaving the EU, we feel the more roots we can put down here now, the better! Richard came along to help us, which was an absolute godsend because they guys at the Ayuntamiento spoke no English, and our Spanish was way too basic. We were amused to find that no-one (including Richard) knew what his house number was. Eventually the lady asked him to take his pick, so we are now Number 30, Basieda. The official register appears to be a printed map of the village with peoples’ names written on by hand next to the houses.

Anna nurturing her salvaged tomato

The garden is looking really good. A few of our beetroot seedlings succumbed to the heat when we missed a day watering, but the majority are OK. The carrot seedlings we planted at the same time seem to cope with drought much better and are perky and happy looking even in the heat of the day. When we first arrived here we found a rogue tomato plant growing between cracks in the courtyard. Anna salvaged it and potted it up, and after a rocky start it is now the tallest (although skinniest) of all our tomatoes. It has a small fruit now, and we look forward to seeing how it tastes.

Lettuce and nasturtium salad!

We now have a regular supply of lettuce from the veg garden (huerta). We are supplying a bag to Richard and Suzanne and a bag for ourselves every couple of days. Anna is getting pretty creative with it now; I didn’t realise until today that you can eat nasturtiums, but the flowers and a couple of the leaves made their way into today’s offering. The flowers were quite sweet, and the whole thing worked very well.

Egyptian vulture!

Anna spotted a couple of birds circling one of the fields today. I said they were storks, but she reckoned they were Egyptian vultures. I grabbed the camera and she was proved right! Very exciting. We only need black and bearded vultures here now to make up the European full house!

– Dave

Last week felt a little slow. I wasn’t feeling well for a few days, we’ve been slacking off a bit and we haven’t really made any progress on anything! But we did have a lovely visit from Dave’s friend Richard, we got our first harvest from the veg patch and we did a particularly challenging Sunday hike.

Don’t get too excited about the ‘first harvest’, it’s only lettuce! But I was pretty excited – and now we get to have a home-grown fresh-from-the-garden crispy salad every few days, which is pretty sweet if you ask me.

Rich was here for 3 days and we got an excuse to be tourists, which was great. We ate in restaurants, drank in bars and went up the Fuente De cable car. And I don’t think we stopped talking the entire time!

There were a few late nights during the week but we managed to pull ourselves together by the weekend to get up for a hike on Sunday. And it’s a good job we started the walk by 10am, because it turned out to be an 11-hour walk! I already knew we’d be doing a lot of up and down, but we were way slower than I’d anticipated. What looked on the map like a 10k route turned out to require extensive switch-backs over tough terrain, multiple detours and a large amount of bush-whacking. I think someone in an office somewhere drew a line on the map on their computer, having never actually been out there to look at it. Still, there were some great views to make up for it and we certainly learned a few things.

This week is off to a better start than the last at least – maybe we will make some progress…

– Anna

The veg garden is going nicely. We have tomatoes, onions, pumpkins, beetroot, cucumbers and lots and lots of lettuce growing well! We have also sowed carrots, coriander, turnip greens and broccoli raab (Anna tells me these last two are to be eaten like salad, mmmm, turnip salad!), and some of these have germinated already. In addition, we have carrots, beetroot, melons, courgette, basil, more coriander and more pumpkin seedlings growing in pots on the balcony. Feeling very green-fingered!

Don’t like to dwell on the weather, but there have been some nice atmospheric phenomena!

We took a trip to Mario and Izaskun’s place last week to say Hi. Mark and Chelsea, our friends from Mazo de Mon were volunteering there so we all met up for lunch and had a good chat.   It was great to see everyone again, to hear plans (Mark and Chelsea are heading to the UK soon for a visit) and to see what has been going on at Mario and Izaskun’s project. Mark and Chelsea have been busy strimming and weeding; the veg garden looks much tidier and the fields have been tamed a little bit. One thing I have realised is that if you want a lot of land out here, you either need to get to love your strimmer, or get some livestock to keep the grass down!

Like 48.1% of the voting population of the UK we got a very nasty shock last Friday when we woke up to hear the UK has voted to leave the EU. We think this is a tragedy for many reasons, and of course it puts our own future here in Spain in some doubt. We are thinking to just get Spanish residency as soon as possible in the hope that it will stand us in good stead if we need to apply for citizenship in future. Just one more sad little result from an all round bad situation!

On a brighter note we went to look at some more land on Friday with our friendly local Estate Agents, they had managed to find us some good sized plots which could work pretty well. Now we just need to make sure we can afford it since our savings are only worth 90% of what they were on Thursday evening!

We finally made it out today for our second walk since arriving back at Olmares. We went for a three-peak challenge, climbing Peña Carazo (2012 m) then walking the ridgeline over El Carazuelo (2021 m) and El Castro (1995 m). It was a glorious day, sunny but quite cool up top, with some cloud to break up the UV! We found a colony of griffon vultures using the thermals generated by the ridge to soar over the landscape, occasionally dropping onto something dead and fighting each other for the tastiest cuts! Spectacular birds as always, and it was great to see them doing their job, clearing up the bodies, preventing disease and keeping the place tidy!

Our three peaks – the sharp one on the left and the two in the middle

The walk out

Picos in the distance on the way home

– Dave

We waved goodbye to Jacquie and Neal and hit the road north.  It was a 14 hour drive, so we broke it up and spent two nights in the middle at a glamping site in eastern Portugal.  My sister had told me about Senses Camping last year but we couldn’t make it there on the cycle tour.  This time we weren’t going to miss it!  As well as looking forward to pitching up without being surrounded by motor homes, I was keen to talk to the owners about how it went setting up something that’s so unusual in Spain and Portugal.

Michel and Natasha welcomed us on Friday evening and we pitched up as the sun went down.  On Saturday we enjoyed exploring the area – a beautifully lush green valley scattered with pretty villages – before finding some time to chat to them in the afternoon. They gave us loads of great advice and couldn’t have been nicer!  Then we helped Michel in the vegetable garden in return for joining their BBQ dinner with their friends from up the lane.  We had a wonderful evening chatting and eating veggie burgers and salad freshly prepared from their garden produce.  Senses camping is a beautiful venue and a shining example of what you can achieve when you set your mind to it.  I hope we will be able to do something like that with our own vision.

Just before we departed on Sunday, the neighbour Olle showed us around his communal garden.  A group of 10 people live there and it’s his job to make sure they are all fed from the land – a task which he appears to have risen to!  We enjoyed a tour of the garden and interesting discussions about gardening techniques, then we had to get back on the road.

Olle showing us his garden

Senses Camping

Almonds

We drove some of the route we’d taken on our bikes last year, crossing the border into Spain, going past Ciudad Rodrigo and Salamanca, covering the distance of a two day ride in a few hours.  Then we headed north through endless boring, flat fields, trying not to fall asleep after last night’s party.  Just when we thought the monotony would never end, all of a sudden we were in the mountains!  Wide open valleys of lush forest gave way to steeper valleys, and we climbed over a pass through the clouds then descended towards our destination – the beautiful village of Basieda.  Red roofs nestled into the mountain side in a never ending forest.  We were back at Olmares.

This is where we were a month or so ago.  The owners of the Olmares holiday apartments are Richard and Suzanne, who offered us an apartment in return for some work over the summer.  It’s working out well so far – we work a little most days to cover our accommodation but still have plenty of time for planning, investigating, integrating, exploring and planting the veg garden!

Things are good, but it’s a strange existence at the moment – not quite on holiday but not quite working, trying to make stuff happen for the future when everything is pretty nebulous, including our plans.  Some days I feel all enthusiastic and productive, other days I don’t see the point in dragging myself out of my cosy bed, but Dave is always there to greet me with a smile and a hug regardless of my mood.

The language is still a barrier of course and I find it my most frustrating barrier.  Not only do I not know how stuff works here, it’s also hard to find out how stuff works when you can’t talk to people properly.  We are learning a little but it’s slower than I expected.  An immersion course may be required later in the year!

Happily we are getting stuff done, little by little.  Dave has prepared the vegetable garden with help from gardener Jose Pedro and a rotovator Jose borrowed from a friend.  I have planted loads of seeds and watched at least some of them sprout.  We have signed up to a hiking club and are going walking with them next month.  We went up a mountain on Friday (not even all the way to the top, but we still would have been towering above Ben Nevis).  It’s beautiful here and we are starting to feel a little settled.

Preparing the veggie patch (and the rocky mountain in the background is the one we went not all the way to the top of on Friday).

King of the castle

Into the clouds

The peak… not today, but soon!

We have a whole stash of lists to work our way through over the coming weeks and months.  I know that this whole thing is going to take time and there will be plenty of frustrations along the way, but at least we have a fixed base for the next few months – a place to call home for the time being.

-Anna

After parting ways with Mark and Chelsea, the two of us stayed at the beach-side campsite another few nights to sort our things out, unwind and make a plan.  Our next stop is going to be in southern Portugal where family friends Jacquie and Neal have just bought a beautiful plot of land and have interesting plans for it.  But we took our time getting there and enjoyed some sightseeing on the way.

Our first stop was the last town in Spain before the border.  We organised a night of air bnb in Tui and turned up around 4pm in the hot sunshine.  Our room was in a lovely house in the suburbs – gardens and vegetable patches around each house and a river trickling between the rows of buildings.  Tui was very pretty and we enjoyed strolling around in the hot sun, stopping on a quiet street for the occasional beer and browsing the markets with the crowds.

Stolling in the market in Tui

The next day we headed for a campsite by the river Douro and met a Quebecois cycle tourist called Erik who was keen for some company.  He’d been riding around Portugal alone for 6 weeks and had hardly met anyone!  So we shared food and beer and stories on plastic chairs by the river and had a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

Hanging out with Erik and the bike he got when he was 19!

That part of Portugal appeared to be almost nothing but eucalyptus plantation.  The stuff grows very quickly in this climate and can be harvested every 8 years, so it’s all over the place.  And for at least two days, we saw pretty much nothing else!  So we were excited to do a boardwalk in the region called Passadicos do Paiva that had been recommended to us.  Even as we drove towards it, the eucalyptus monoculture continued, only giving way where it had been recently felled.  In fact, the car park for the walk was in a eucalyptus plantation!  This place must really be a wildlife island in a sea of barren forestry.

We got to the start of the walk by the lovely river and started to see a few patches of deciduous woodland.  Then we climbed up the wooden boardwalk steps past cork oak trees and gorse bushes, the land apparently regenerating after having been abandoned.  There were areas where you could make out old terraces with stone walls, so the land here was probably farmed in recent times and now it is starting to rewild itself in the absence of human activity.  All around the valley, the edges of plantations are visible, and there are even a few eucalyptus trees in the valley, but happily it seems to have escaped the worst of civilisation.  We had a lovely walk and stopped in the shade by the river at the far end for lunch before heading all the way back.

The boardwalk at Passadicos do Paiva

Enjoying a break in the shade

We continued south and eucalyptus gave way to agricultural land and sprawling villages.  The next stop on the way south was the medieval walled town of Obidos, recommended by Jacquie.  We found a lovely campsite nearby and drove into the town after lunch.  Obidos is a fabulous place – a gorgeous old town with a wonderfully restored wall that you can walk all the way around, pretending you’re looking out for attacking armies!  We spent all afternoon wandering around, enjoying the sights and having a drink in a courtyard under the shade of a lemon tree.  Sometimes it’s great to be a tourist!

Patrolling the wall

The town of Obidos

Today was our last day before we head to Jacquie and Neal’s tomorrow.  We passed Lisbon and enjoyed a change of scenery from farmland to cork oak forest.  The oaks have their outer layer of bark harvested from the trunk every 8 years for cork, but they still look grand and gnarly.  And between the trees the sandy soil is covered with grasses and wildflowers, buzzing with insects and singing with birds.  I think it’s the most beautiful industrial landscape I’ve ever seen.  Drink more wine!

We stopped off in a lovely little village for lunch where a crowd of people were having a BBQ.  It was a Dutch family who moved there 30 years ago and their Portuguese neighbours who welcomed us with beer and food, which was delightful.

Tomorrow we will arrive with Jacquie and Neal to share stories and knowledge and lend a helping hand.  I’m looking forward to it!

– Anna

After saying bye to Richard and Suzanne until June, we headed east towards Bilbao. We were going to stay for one week with Mario, Izaskun and their two year old daughter Maya outside a little village called Gibaja near the Basque Country. The family met us in a bar in Gibaja, and after buying us a beer and everyone introducing themselves, we headed back to the homestead. It is a great place. They have taken an old agricultural building with five acres of hilly pasture and turned it into a really beautiful and comfortable family home with a big vegetable garden, a chicken shed, a greenhouse and the beginnings of a forest garden. There is loads of work still to do but Mario (who is there full time) has a lot of energy and the drive to get it done. We will be fascinated to see how it looks in ten years time! We were also excited to meet Marnie, the family’s huge Mastine. She is three years old, extremely playful and very much a bull in a china shop!

Anna quickly doing some work while Marnie is distracted

In the veg garden

Anna’s snail

During our stay along with two other volunteers, Joe and Monika, we developed a terrace for planting, weeded the forest garden (the trees are still very small) and helped to build a chicken tractor. This is a moveable chicken shed with open floors which can be placed on vegetable beds while they are fallow, allowing the chickens to fertilise the ground as well as scratch up pests and unwanted seeds. Everything Mario is doing is based on permaculture principles. He is capturing rainwater, introducing terraces to retain water and trying to set things up so that things run themselves wherever possible. It was really good to see someone just starting out who is really thinking about the long-term implications of the decisions he makes now, and hopefully saving himself a lot of work (and fertiliser) in the long run!

One of the things we really liked about Mario was that he is really enthusiastic and open minded about sustainable practices, but at the same time he is quite analytical and cynical – a rare combination! One evening we watched “A Farm for the Future”, which is a BBC documentary following a young Farmer as she discovers ways to make her family farm in Devon more sustainable and ready to compete in tomorrow’s market. It was great to watch with other interested people and discuss the ideas, theories and practices that we saw.

During our stay we were also invited to go to Mario and Isazkun’s city pad in Bilbao, where Isazkun still works part-time. They told us all the nice places to see, and we had a very pleasant time wandering the streets, taking pictures of the giant spider and puppy outside the Guggenheim Museum (we’ll have to wait til we’re rich again to actually go in!), and drinking delicious cold beer by the harbour wall. We like Spain!

We were only at Gibaja for one week, and the end came too soon for us! We said goodbye to everyone and headed off to our next stop, which was in Western Asturias. It’s called Mazo de Mon, and I will sign off here to let Anna work her descriptive magic.

– Dave

We spent a lovely few days with Richard and Suzanne at Basieda. We helped to tidy up the weeds in an old ruin and cleaned up the garden in preparation for paying guests. In our free time we visited friends who are hoping to begin a sustainable community in the area, and met their friends who are full time beekeepers, which was a very interesting diversion. We also went to the local natural history museum with Pili, who helps Richard and Suzanne around the house. Pili took us back to her place for coffee and a delicious cake which Anna describes as a cheese-custard tart-flan thing. It tasted great anyway! We also met Pili’s teenage daughter and her 83-year old father, who was busy sharpening a scythe when we showed up ready for a relaxing afternoon cutting the grass.

Giant (and sadly dead) sweet chestnut tree

The river through Potes

We drove around the area visiting all the little villages we could find and seeing what kind of properties were for sale. We love the area, the question is, can we afford to live there?? Towards the end of our stay, Richard and Suzanne made us an offer; in return for three mornings a week plus chauffeuring them to town and back they are willing to let us stay in one of the apartments  from June till September. Of course we were delighted to accept, as this will let us spend more time exploring the area from a very plush home base!

View from the terrace

– Dave

We returned from Scotland to a whirlwind of social engagements with family and friends – Anna’s mum observed it must be nice when everywhere you go, everyone is pleased to see you!

We spent a few days in London with Anna’s parents where we were royally looked after as usual. Uncle Phil (British Free Range Egg Producer of the Year 2015) came to visit, and we did a quality test on some of Chiswick’s free range eggs. Sadly, while some of them passed muster, others were denounced as suspected battery eggs by Uncle Phil. So choose your free range eggs carefully everyone! Warning signs to look out for are very runny whites (this also happens with old hens) and very dark orange yolks, which indicate that the hens’ diets are being supplemented with colourings – not necessary in well cared for hens!

My brother Dan came up from our hometown of Bexhill for dinner and drinks with our friends, missed the last train home but managed a mammoth multi-stage, five hour journey home to the south coast, arriving home at 5 am, then getting up at 7 am to go on a training course.  Anna and I had a more leisurely journey  south on Saturday, arriving in time for a chat with the family before we all headed out for delicious Nepalese food at The Gurkhas (Bexhill’s finest restaurant!).

On Sunday we went to visit my friend Adam’s family and say hello to their new baby, very exciting times! Then we headed up to the local fruit farm where my Dad keeps his bees, to check their progress coming into Spring. We found mostly healthy colonies, but one had been invaded by a mouse which had eaten all the honey while the bees were huddling in the middle of the hive through winter; the poor old bees had then starved to death! Dad blamed himself of course, he really loves those bees!

Queen Bee!

Mouse attack!

Chilling out

Learning about bees

Bee eggs and larvae

Monday was a visit to the Bedgebury National Pinetum and Forest with my sister Kathleen and three year old nephew Casey. We had planned to find some snakes; unfortunately the snakes didn’t want to be found, but luckily Bedgebury has loads of amazing adventures for kids, you can’t go 200 yards on the “Play Path” without encountering dragon-infested castles to be conquered and intricate pyramid mazes to be explored! Casey also showed a great aptitude as a naturalist, pointing out moorhens and coots to his mum after just a few minutes learning! After that it was delicious homemade dim sum at mum and dads with our friends Andy and Yubin. The aunts came round as well to have a chat and see us off. Finally our friend Jo made it down to Bexhill from London, arriving at about 11 pm and staying up chatting with us till 2 am. What an effort, especially as she’d only got off a flight from Florida that morning!

Casey and Anna chatting to the mallards

On Tuesday we headed down to Portsmouth to catch the ferry to Santander. Anna isn’t a natural sailor, and didn’t really enjoy the trip, but I managed to spend a few hours outside failing to see dolphins. The Picos de Europa (the Peaks of Europe) mountains are so called because they were the first thing sailors saw when arriving into northern Spain. The weather was excellent this time round, and I was treated to a view of them rising out of the sea as we approached the coast.

Picos in the distance

Palacio de la Magdalena

We spent our first night in Santander with Silvia and Carlos, an amazing Spanish couple who put us up the first two nights of our cycle tour last year, as well as taking us climbing in the mountains. It was great to see them again; we were sad that it was a week night and they had to go to bed early, but we are hoping that we will get to see them again soon!

On Thursday morning we got in the car and headed towards Basieda, a hamlet in the Picos. Here we met with Suzanne and Richard, friends of our extended family who have kindly offered to host us for a week in their amazing restored manor house and apartments. I can’t do the place justice as it is just incredible, we can’t believe our luck being able to stay here! The house and grounds were pretty much ruined when Suzanne and Richard came here in the late ’80’s, but everything has been lovingly restored, and the guys now welcome lucky visitors throughout the summer months. We had a good look through the manor house today; I was ogling the hand-hewn floorboards and the giant trevidé oven, while Anna was checking out the views across the valley from the top floor bedroom. After that we went on the “short circuit” walk up into the hills, wandering though mixed oak and beech forest, across streams and through meadows full of daisies and orchids. We feel like we’re making the right choice moving out here!

Emerging beech leaves

Winter rose (just finished)

Orchids

Leaves and lichen

Beech leaves up close

When we got back there was just time to get changed then it was round to Suzanne and Richard’s place for drinks and tapas so they could tell us a little bit about the area and their experiences here. There wasn’t enough time to take it all in of course, so hopefully there will be chances for more chats in the coming week. We will be helping out in the gardens and the outbuildings for the next few days so plenty of opportunities for informative discussions coming up!

View from our window

– Dave

We spent the Winter in a kind of hibernation. Working casual jobs, planning our wedding, watching movies, plotting our escape. As February came to a close, we were ready to blossom into action before Spring had really arrived, and started packing up to leave the Big Smoke. We bought an old car, got it fixed up a bit and filled it with everything we needed for the Summer. Then we stopped in Cambridgeshire for the weekend to get married on our way to our Scottish honeymoon.

It was beautiful to spend our wedding day immersed in a sea of smiles and hugs from friends and family. The readings, speeches, videos and music were all brilliant. We enjoyed ourselves enormously – thank you to everyone!

After the celebrations we drove to Skye, then the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond, taking in hikes and scenic views all the way. It was still pretty wintery but every day was lighter for longer than the one before and the promise of Spring was coming with the melting snow. We met wonderful new people, visited some good friends and started settling in to life as husband and wife.

After month of hiking around Scotland and living in a tent, we were happy to spend a few days in the luxury of my parents’ place in London, then Dave’s parents’ place in Bexhill. And now our plans are starting to come together, I find myself enjoying every day whilst looking forward to our future.

On 12 April we board a ferry to Santander. We’re going to be spending the Summer in northern Spain, volunteering on farms, checking out different regions, learning everything we can fit into our brains and putting together a business plan. By the end of the year we hope to get ourselves a smallholding and set it up in combination with a little eco tourism business, whilst somehow being involved in environmental work on the side! Hopefully by Autumn we will have a better idea of how we’re going to make it all work.

So for now, we are feeling relaxed in the present, with interesting times ahead! We will keep you updated…

Some pictures from the wedding

Some pictures from the honeymoon

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