3. From Wales to Portugal Part 2
This is the third blog of our journey
For the second part click here…
We started to plan our wedding and as Leon and I were so different to any relationship we had had before we wanted our day to be as different as we were. We started to think about where to do it and who to invite but it quickly became really difficult coping with all the family demands. At one stage we even thought about going abroad to do it just to keep it simple and easy but then I thought of my mum and my son and it wasn’t fair on them as they wouldn’t be able to attend. My family is not rich and no one had the money to be able to travel, Leon and I were also broke so everything had to be on a shoestring budget.
We had been doing some work at a local retreat centre and had worked days down there helping them to put up the yurts that they rented out, I had been sewing the canvases, Leon had been doing lots of repairs around their property and they didn’t pay us, we kept asking for the money but there were non stop excuses. So we decided to ask them if we could use the yurts for a weekend and the land to get married on, they hastily agreed in exchange for the money they owed us. There was a big wedding there about a month before ours and a massive tent was erected, it turned out many years ago Gareth had actually designed this tent so we got speaking to the owners of it. The upcoming wedding was the last function of the season for the tent so we asked them if they would leave it up for another month for our wedding and we would then help them to take it down, they agreed and for a minimal fee that we could pay them after the wedding.
I spent the time making decorations, getting all the vintage blankets and fabrics together that had come into the factory over the years, I made the table decorations from old crystal ornaments, I got my dresses from ebay and took them to a seamstress to alter them for me. We ordered our shoes, Leon’s waistcoat and Sunny’s wedding dress from aliexpress and we borrowed hay bales from one of my accountancy clients. We planned to make all the food ourselves and went shopping to the warehouse to get the massive amounts of alcohol we knew would be needed and one of our friends made our wedding cake and was going to DJ for the day. We would make the tables from pallets and the wooden floor boards Gareth had left over and Conor would do the photography and we found a wonderful lady priestess to come and marry us on the day.
It was becoming more and more difficult to leave the land and we wanted to be there full time but we also had to earn money for everyday expenses and the wedding, the recycling company wasn’t doing well at all and my online shops where I would sell tv parts and other things had been closed down by ebay and they froze the money in my paypal account which left me in a really bad financial position so I used to go and do the car boot sales every Saturday and Sunday with things that had been brought into the factory and stuff we didn’t use anymore. I would leave the fields at 4am and get into my little red car, my jeep had long gone by this point and I was running around in a tiny little Toyota. I used to pack it like a jigsaw and get so much stuff in there people would be amazed. Leon was doing as many jobs as he could find and as soon as money would come in it would go back out but slowly all the plans started to come together.
The Friday of our wedding weekend arrived and we filled up my car and Leons van with all the decorations and supplies for the wedding, our friends and family who were going to help with the preparations came to meet us there. The girls and some of the boys were in the big tents putting up all the decorations and Leon and most of the male guests were in one of the yurts getting drunk. I was so stressed and there was so much to do, we had taken our generator down there and Leon’s dad wasn’t happy with it and although we assured him it was powerful enough to power a small town he kept finding fault. At one point he couldn’t get it to work so I went to look at it, flipped the reset button and it sprung into action. He then decided the tables that still needed to be constructed wouldn’t work and I kept telling him they would be fine, two pallets for the legs with a piece of wood to bridge them and one of the wooden sheets on top. It went on for hours and there wasn’t one table constructed as there were so many reasons coming out for why they weren’t worth constructing. I lost my patience, grabbed a drill and threw one of them together in 10 minutes. His dad wasn’t impressed and said they weren’t strong enough so I jumped on a hay bale and up onto the table I just made and asked how strong did they need to be. He walked off in a temper and finally the tables started to be built. My relationship with Leon’s parents was becoming more and more difficult and I had long ago started to feel like they didn’t like me although I had tried really hard with them.
We worked until it got dark and then me and all the girls went to our yurt while the boys were still partying in the other one. It was freezing that night and I hardly slept so I got up early in the morning and came out of the yurt hoping to see Leon but he had left to go back to the fields to check on the pigs. I wondered if he was having second thoughts as the day before had been a nightmare with so much to organise but I got a glimpse of him a few hours later and felt secure once again. There were a lot of last minute preparations and the weather was typically Welsh in the morning, cloudy with rain and I prayed that it would clear up in time for us to get married. The guests had started to arrive and I needed to start getting ready myself. Leon was walking my mum across the fields to the girls’ yurt and I smiled thinking what a gentleman he was and how lucky I was to be about to become his wife.
The wedding was incredible and so relaxed, Sunny & Bizzy were right at our sides when we got married, Bizzy looked so smart in his vintage dickie bow. Leon had forgotten his vows and lost his bit of paper that he’d written them on so he just copied what I had said. Everyone was smiling and happy, it really was wonderful. I ran back to the yurt to change into my other dress for the party and just as I was arriving back to the tent a huge rainbow appeared in the sky, right over the tent. I knew it was a sign, rainbows and the number 12 had been good omens for me for years. Everything was as it was meant to be and Leon hugged me tight as we looked at the beautiful colours in the sky.
The girls’ yurt was transformed into our honeymoon yurt that night and Leon and I woke up early, he went off to check the pigs and I sat with our friends who had also stayed over. We started to clean up the place and slowly people started to leave. Leon and I finally got back to the fields about 9pm that night, our honeymoon had been spent cleaning up after the wedding. We didn’t mind as we had had an amazing time with everyone but we were happy to be back in our shed with the dogs and the pigs, our married life had just begun.
Conor my son would come and stay with us down the fields and had done up a little caravan further up from ours and sometimes friends would come down and stay there too but not so often, our life off the grid was not an easy one and they preferred the comforts of a normal life with hot running water and flushing toilets. Our third furry family member arrived at this point, little Lola, she was being given away on Facebook I offered to take her and rehome her but she said she’d try to sell her first That morning Leon and I had talked about getting another dog and decided 2 was enough, at 9pm that night the woman called us and said she was going to put Lola out on the street and if we wanted to come and get her it was tonight or not at all so we got in the car and drove to pick her up. She was tiny, a cross pug with a jack russell and so small we had to pick her up or she’d drown in the muddy puddles of the field. She was besotted with Bizzy but the feeling wasn’t mutual and she humped everything she could get her paws around but we adored her just like the others.
Gareth then went to America for a few months with an old girlfriend and we told him we’d clean up his polytunnel for him before he came back. It was beyond filthy and there was mold growing inside his caravan all over everything, it took us days to clean it and outside which was his kitchen area was infested with rats as he just kept his rubbish in a pile in the corner, we thought he’d be happy when he got back…how wrong we were! As I was leaving one morning to go to the car boot sale I saw some torch lights up near where we parked our cars and I thought it must be Alan one of our neighbours who kept some chickens on a bit of land there but then I realised there was more than one torch and I knew that meant trouble. I shouted to ask who was there and some men shouted back they were looking for their dog, I knew that was rubbish and told them to wait there I was going to get my husband and my dogs, at which point they jumped in a car and drove back up the lane at full speed. I got up to the track but they were long gone, probably just as well as I was on my own and as brave as I am there were a few of them and just me. I went to the car boot sale and when I returned home I told Leon so we went to investigate and found little piles of tools and things outside some of the old caravans and Gareth’s polytunnel. We put everything back inside and had no idea if they had taken anything or not. It felt very different down the fields after that episode and we were constantly listening out for noises at night. I picked Gareth up from the airport on his return from America and told him what had happened, he said it wasn’t the first time and there had been a few instances of burglars coming down there over the years, that’s why he had put up a post in the middle of the lane with a padlock on it to stop unwanted cars coming down the track. The men in the car had smashed the lock off it and we had replaced it with a combination lock which Gareth wasn’t happy about. I told him I’d cleaned up for him and he seemed grateful initially.
A few days later he came round for food as normal, I often cooked for him and his mood was dark, Leon was at work and I asked him what was the matter. He just came out and said that he didn’t believe anyone had been down and that it was Leon that had stolen his things, he wasn’t happy that I had cleaned his shit pit either now he couldn’t find anything and I should just of left it alone, he didn’t mind the rats and the cats that were wild there dealt with them adequately enough. I was totally in shock and asked him what things had been stolen, he said his kitchen knife that he used to chop his vegetables and another few tools. I told him that was absolutely rubbish and I couldn’t believe he would think that of us. He ate his food and left me at the table in tears. I told Leon when he came home and he was furious, he went round to see Gareth and told him straight that he hadn’t touched his stuff and how we were trying to help and surprise him with sorting out his plastic hole. A few days later Gareth came around again and said that he had found his tools and one of his friends had actually been into his polytunnel and taken his knife and other equipment, I said you accused Leon of that don’t you think you owe him and us an apology but he just shrugged his shoulders again and said people make mistakes and walked out. We didn’t feel welcome there at all after that and the atmosphere whenever we saw him was strained to say the least.
I spoke to Leon about moving and we started to look for somewhere else to move to, we wanted to buy our own place and looked at land but it was all so expensive and even if we found somewhere cheap the laws were such that we couldn’t live on it and would have to live illegally as we were already doing down Gareth’s land, we didn’t want to do that but we kept looking and I again told him about Portugal. He said he’d have to go there first and take a look, I thought to myself there’s no way we’ll ever get there thinking that way but I was also a big believer in positive thinking or cosmic ordering, whatever you want to call it. So I got a big map of Portugal and put it above our log burner and I would look at it all the time and imagine myself breathing in the Portuguese air and driving around the countryside.
Little Lola was 9 months old at this point and had come into season, we kept her and Bizzy totally apart which wasn’t easy but we managed by making him a house outside the house, he didn’t seem interested but we weren’t taking any risks. We came home from work one day and were just getting organised in the house when we heard Lola cry, we looked around and couldn’t see her or Bizzy either, they had somehow sneaked off into the woods and when we got there they were totally stuck together which seemed impossible as he was a big Staffordshire bull terrier and she was a little jug but stuck they were. We just stayed with them in a state of shock until they came apart and took Lola back in the shed while Bizzy went off embarrassed to his kennel. It was the first time for both of them and we didn’t know what to do, we were not so clued up on dog breeding at this time and hoped nothing would happen but a few weeks later Lola got fatter and we knew she was pregnant. We took her up to the vets and they suggested an abortion but I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, this was our mess and we’d deal with it. They scanned her at the vets and said they thought there were about 7 pups inside her, this was the last thing we needed……to be continued
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