To my surprise I found about three missed calls from our solicitor, so I immediately called him.  He told me he did not know how, but our buyer had completed!  We then had a couple of weeks to leave Birmingham and a few days longer to move in to La Alcazaba.  The relief was enormous, and I ordered some Cava to celebrate.  

We had spent a lot of time planning what possessions should be for Spain and these were transported to arrive about 4 days after we moved in. 

All the other items for Switzerland were put into storage.  This was because Josephine had not found a suitable flat and we did not know how long it would be before we could complete our Swiss purchase. 

The next shock was that having got the keys for our flat we found the last owners had left everything in it, even their personal things, like wine, food and even their toiletries were still in the bathroom!  Our large delivery from Birmingham of furniture and various possessions was due in a couple of days and there was nowhere to put it all. 

Panic set in, we had to get rid of so many things we did not want and quickly!  We did it just in time and we were then able to unpack and enjoy being there.  Mum and Dad were so pleased we had come to be so near to them, as we were too.  


Buying Our Swiss Home

Eventually, Josephine found the flat she wanted, and we bought her house in Winterthur this was in March 2003, so once we had moved in, our possessions from Birmingham arrived safely and we then had to deal with all the paperwork required by the Swiss to allow us to live there.  It was such an ordeal even though Trudy is Swiss, so many documents had to be produced and verified (we had no idea of what many of them even were!).  We succeeded eventually, but it did take several weeks. 


Changing Homes Every Two Months

Once we were settled, we decided we would spend two months in each home, dividing our time with our parents. 

We purchased a second-hand Audi A6 allroad car (it was just six months old and had run only 6,000km) having sold our Jensen CV8.  

After driving our Jensens for so many years, it was such a big learning curve to learn all about the new technology, our car had all the extras possible and I found it was rather amazing to find out just how much had changed since the 1960's.  But it was nowhere near as fast as our CV8 the acceleration from a standing start was sluggish and this disturbed me, once past about twenty kmh the car then responded well. 

Our plan was to drive back to Spain to see how we felt about it, as against flying.  I planned our route and booked two hotel stops, this turned out to be quite an adventure that we really enjoyed.  The views were spectacular, we had the mountains and the coastal views all the way, the roads were particularly good, plus we found lots of interesting places to see and stay in. 

These trips were done so that we could spend equal time to be with and to help our parents, as we were aware of them getting older.