Cheers guys. Your good wishes do help us along, especially when things get a bit stressy.
We are, with the help of a Spanish friend, doing everything by-the-book (I hope!) The plan is to end up with a nice home to live in & a business that pays the bills and feeds us. If we can get to that point we'll be happy and we don't want there to be any "skeletons in the closets" in the years to come. The area is beautiful, the mountains are stunning, the cycling - both MTB and road, is fantastic and the locals are friendly. We couldn't ask for any more.
I will take some progress pics at post them, although my picture posting has only been possible so far with the help of Stoner!
Photos. More than one way. Photobucket account/app. Upload to there. Click on photo and seelct <I info icon> click on Direct and then paste that into stw popup you get from the IMG button above
Advertising on here isn't allowed but if you put your website into your profile 😉
Cheers Jambalaya 🙂
I'll post some updates soon.
We will sort out official advertising on here when we're ready to roll, meanwhile people can love / hate our story on this thread 😉
Container arrives from Barcelona this morning . . .
We drove past your house a few times over the last couple of days Spekkie. If you see the BasqueMTB vans give us a wave and we will stop to say hello. We will be here a couple of days a week for the next six weeks or so.
jealous, love this thread, can't wait to see the updates. Looks an amazing part of the world for biking
😀
[i]We drove past your house a few times over the last couple of days Spekkie. If you see the BasqueMTB vans give us a wave and we will stop to say hello. We will be here a couple of days a week for the next six weeks or so.[/i]
Did see you towing a trailer, but we were a little way away.
Are you still here?
We are in some other areas just now but will be back Tuesday! We will be here a couple of days each week until mid May I think.
Will keep an eye out . . .
When do you plan to be open spekkie? I'm planning a trip to the Ainsa area in early September.
Good luck in the project. I had a bike touring holiday years ago and stayed in the area, set off in Barcelona and ended up in Pamplona staying in casa rurales and camping.
I now live in Spain so well done going legal, most expats don't bother but if something goes wrong and you aren't legal it costs a fortune.
Anyway I would love to return to the area so if anyone else is up for some cycle touring post summer get in touch. We did all the small villages alongside the Pyrenees.
Best of luck my emails in profile if you need any help.
Potdog - We'll have a bed for you by September I'm sure (if not we're going to be broke and in trouble!) and by then I'll have ridden all the trails so I'll know my way around 🙂
Poolman - would be great to see you for some riding sometime and maybe pick your brains by email meanwhile. Cheers for that.
I don't have much to add other than well done, I'm following this too. Keep on keeping on...
Thanks MTB-Idle.
That's great news spekkie. Please drop me a line, my email is in my profile and I'll arrange some dates with you nearer the time. Will be around the 12th / 13th September for 2 or 3 nights before I catch my ferry from Huelva back to Tenerife.
Good luck with the build in the meantime!
Hi, your story somewhat mirrors ours, we moved to Southern Cataluña last September. Mrs PB and I decided to make the leap before we were too old to do athletic stuff like multi-day mountain bike trips(me) and triathlons (her). We bought a 200 year old finca with 8 acres of almond and olive trees. We joined the local bike club and trail running group, the local people have been really friendly and helpful and despite not speaking much Catalan, we get along brilliantly. Take the last 3 weekends as an example, Easter I did a 3 day bike packing trip, 200km around the El Port mountain range, [url= http://pedalesdelosports.com ]Details here[/url], following Sunday, a 40km race around the local mountains which we both did and yesterday a middle distance triathlon, wife did the full race and I was talked into doing the bike leg in a team. She finished 2nd female and our team finished 3rd. Not bad for a couple in our mid 50's.
The people we bought from happen to be British and still live locally, they are amazed that we have already made so many Spanish friends, they have been here 20 years and seem to exclusively associate with ex pats. We are determined to not go down this road, our biggest challenge is that we are learning Castillian Spanish where most people speak Catalan. I'm assuming being in Aragon, this isn't so much of an issue for you.
I too have made a big effort to get to know the local trails to enable us to show people around when they visit. It's a dirty job etc. Not sure if we will make this a business opportunity, we have a self contained flat attached to the house which sleeps 4.
Good luck with your adventure, Ainsa is getting a good rep with the Zona Zero trails, that and the magnificent Ordesa canyon should mean you don't get bored anytime soon.
Nice
[i]Hi, your story somewhat mirrors ours, we moved to Southern Cataluña last September . . . .
The people we bought from happen to be British and still live locally, they are amazed that we have already made so many Spanish friends, they have been here 20 years and seem to exclusively associate with ex pats. We are determined to not go down this road, our biggest challenge is that we are learning Castillian Spanish where most people speak Catalan. I'm assuming being in Aragon, this isn't so much of an issue for you.
Ainsa is getting a good rep with the Zona Zero trails, that and the magnificent Ordesa canyon should mean you don't get bored anytime soon. [/i]
We vowed to "try and fit in" with the locals and we got a fair bit of negativity from people regarding this who said the locals would not accept us, but so far all the locals we've met have been fantastic.
Zona Zero is awesome. Trail discovery starts tomorrow afternoon . . . 🙂
Our stuff arrived on Thursday. Most of it went into storage until the house is ready but some things came back to the apartment with us.
Lot's of help from the locals and our framer neighbour and his tractor - the last bit of lane was too narrow for the truck . . .
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/HrsGusLRZKqcPVmK7 [/img]
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/x1W3F8sf6dDfDHJf8 [/img]
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/EaRDgTVWuijDPJws8 [/img]
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/XBe1onwdE8HCWeJB8 [/img]
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/WNZ1rzkSbJmv5Jye6 [/img]
[img] https://goo.gl/photos/5cLjfa5JjJEW6J6u8 [/img]
The Farmer supplied lunch and a shot of wine midday 🙂
No idea why the images show as broken links - I did a Get Link from my Google Photos.
photo embed SOS 😉
When I've lived abroad (US and Singapore) have always tried to avoid ex-pat only existance. Its tough but IME it really helps if you have a hobby/activity and you join a local club as you've done.
Post the raw link - lets have a look (as I said I can't link from Flikr anymore)
Maybe Stoner can fix this for me . . . .
(Looking at "view page source" didn't clear matters up but there are some funny comments by the page designers hidden in there 🙂 )
[url= https://goo.gl/photos/HrsGusLRZKqcPVmK7 ]1[/url]
[url= https://goo.gl/photos/x1W3F8sf6dDfDHJf8 ]2[/url]
[url= https://goo.gl/photos/XBe1onwdE8HCWeJB8 ]3[/url]
[url= https://goo.gl/photos/WNZ1rzkSbJmv5Jye6 ]4[/url]
[url= https://goo.gl/photos/5cLjfa5JjJEW6J6u8 ]5[/url]
our biggest challenge is that we are learning Castillian Spanish where most people speak Catalan
The Catalan population was diluted by Franco. We found lots of friendly Spanish lived in the region (and a few friendly Catalans happy to speak Spanish). There were a few miserable ****s too. Our boss for example who later did three years in jail.
And for Spekkie, we've found the people in NW Spain great, even the ones who don't like the rest of the Spanish.
The Ordesa Canyon had zealous guards.
@spekkie same reason I cannot get Flickr to work - those are "page links" not references to specific JPG or PNG file references. Also I've found if path uses https that needs to be edited to http. It may be possible to use that Google site to host/link but I'm not sure
I uploaded one to my photobucket - this is the sort of link you need (imo) ending in JPG
[img] [/img]
Cheers Jambalaya - I'll have a proper look when I get home.
I used google photos because I was worried about getting the silly "frog pic (or worse)" if I linked to somewhere I wasn't supposed to! Lol minefield!
Yesterday we took an hours drive to the Historic town of Alquezar we'd been told was worth visiting. It certainly was beautiful.
We've had three builders look at the plans and the property now and we're waiting for quotes. We've applied for planning permission and we're waiting for that to come back now.
Lots of waiting going on, but lots of Trails around Ainsa to explore, so not all bad 🙂
Spanish builders, perhaps the honeymoon is about to be over 😉
Ditto Spanish bureaucracy, it has taken 6 months for our local ajuntament to stamp our house deeds and return them to the solicitor so our retention money can be released to us. It was "only" €800 but the wheels move very slowly. We have been told that if we want to make alterations requiring plans to be authorised, the official architect works in our area 1 morning a fortnight ! Never mind, the sun's shining and the trails are in great nick after the bit of rain end of last week has dampened the loose marbles.
You might be interested in [url= http://cat700.com/en/ ]This[/url] in a couple of months, I entered a couple of weeks ago.
Salut.
good luck with the builders. If ever I were to get the chance to do as you, fortunately Im comfortable enough in my own building capabilities to crack on myself. But still organising subbies to do sparks, or groundworks would be a nightmare!
Re pictures,
google photos is a pain for embedding in threads because the Image adress is too long for STW.
however, if you go to https://picasaweb.google.com/ instead, you should be able to see your photo folders through the old picasa portal. in the Right hand dialogue box of the photo screen you will find "link to this photo"
check "Image only", select "Medium-640" from the Select Size drop down, and then copy the text in the Embed img window.
the Alternative is to paste the long url from the img address in Photos into a url shortener like: https://goo.gl/
and then use that : https://goo.gl/2fooI2
[img] https://goo.gl/2fooI2 [/img]
Also, employing Spanish builders will make you very familiar with the concept of " mes o minus" nothing can be done to alter this phoenomenon. 😀
I'm already familiar with that "phrase".
I will be holding onto the purse strings tightly and I will be on site all day myself doing the garden. So I won't be interested in any nonsense from Mr Sanchez and his mates.
un Saludo
We asked three different builders to quote us on our building project and they are starting to get back to us with prices now. We have a meeting on Friday morning with the first builder we talked to. The other two are not far behind.
It has taken longer than I expected for them to put their quotes together, but they are quoting everything from the new roof on top down to the water service trenches from the street at the bottom . . . and everything in-between.
We should also hear from the municipality this week regarding planning permission. When I spoke to them recently they said that everything was going well and the council architect was happy apart from a small question that needed to be cleared up with our architect.
Slowly but surely . . . . . Meanwhile, to keep ourselves busy, Mrs Spekkie is practising her recipes on me and I'm doing what I can at the house in preparation.
🙂
8)
Well done on this. I live in Spain and just shop around for the building work, use skilled labour for skilled jobs and a peon for the grunt work. I have actually enjoyed the running around pricing up materials.
I may get over your way at the end of summer on my touring bike so will let you know. I have explored the ordessa canyon area and cycletoured the area before.
Good luck in the venture, email me if u want to know anything I wouldn't want to post on a public forum...
Cheers Poolman. I've dropped you a mail.
Check the legals carefully...
My wife's cousin bought a property in Portugal to do up. It turned to have been built without planning permission. To cut a long story short, she lost everything and ended up back in the UK homeless. Along the way her English builder stole many of the nice fittings and new materials she'd paid for - then buggered off.
She didn't speak the language, and as a single woman in a Mediterranean country it seemed like everyone was out to rip her off, including lawyers and accountants 🙁
Cheers IDD - our place was built around 200 years ago and has deeds etc all in order.
IDD, that's a terrible story, sadly not uncommon in Spain and Portugal. Italy neither as planning permission takes 10 years so people just build stuff anyway and deal with the consequences later.
That's a terrible story about the Portugese property, the first thing the estate agent told us was to ensure anything we bought had a habitation certificate, this goes a long way to securing your rights. It seems a lot of the horror stories involve property in urbanaciones on the coast in the south, notably Valencia, Alicante and the Costa Del Sol. North West Spain, especially inland, seems less susceptible to people acting like it's the Wild West.
As a side note to IDD's story (re the English builder/thief), 3 years ago when we first started investigating moving to Spain etc I was saddened to read that the people most likely to try and rip you off if you relocated to Spain were "the Brits already there".
Going out to the French Pyrenees tomorrow, close to the Andorra border.
A friend bought a shed there 3 yrs ago and has slowly been doing it up. He hasn't really come across many issues at all.
Cracking Thread 🙂
Would love to do the same thing in Galicia..
We've had a good couple of weeks. . . .
Last week we stopped at a pavement cafe for coffee and got talking to a couple from Colorado in the US who were touring the area and had hired an MTB each. We ended up riding together on some of the local Zona Zero trails around Ainsa. It was good for me to get out with other riders for a change - usually I ride MTB alone. They have taken our details and they are watching our "blog". They've also given me the details of a business local to them that does MTB tours with a view to sending people our way once we're up and running 🙂 We rode up to our place and they had a good look around - they plan to come back next year and spend more time here in Ainsa and less time touring around.
Aside from a few days of good riding I've been spending my time with the continued job of "taming the garden" whilst Mrs Spekkie practices her recipes for Tapas dishes, and we're both still trying to learn Spanish.
We're still waiting for our planning permission application to come back from the council but in the meantime we've had a quote back from the first of the three builders we've talked to.
Slowly but surely, we're getting there . . . .
Coming to this thread late, but please tell me someone has tipped of Kevin McCloud.
