7. Back Off the Grid Portuguese Style
We were on a high driving back to the rented house, we had finally found our forever home and it was incredible. We talked all the way home about the things we needed to do now to get ready for moving back to an off grid life. We couldn’t move onto the farm until the beginning of June as the Spanish farmer had a contract with the sellers and had paid up to that date. As we were driving along one of the main roads Mandy started to lose power, we looked at each other, we knew what this meant, Mandy was sick! She had never struggled during a journey, only when we stopped and started her again. We had about 100kms still to go so we slowed right down, we knew if we stopped her she may not start again so we just went at a snail’s pace. She managed to make the journey back to the rented house and coughed and sputtered all the way up the drive. We both agreed to look at her in the morning and to just get inside to sort out the dogs, it had been a very long day.
There was no electricity or water at the farm so that evening we ordered the solar and wind hybrid kit we’d been looking at for a while, we arranged for them to be delivered to Paddy’s address as we had a problem with the postman not knowing where we were and Leon started to make a list of all the fittings he would need to make a ram pump. A ram pump needs a flow of water but will pump water great distances using nothing but pressure. We also needed some tools and things so that we could start working on the farm when we got there, all our research back in Wales was starting to pay off. We decided to go to the hardware shop in the morning and get the things we needed.
The following morning we were so happy and excited we totally forgot about Mandy’s issues the day before. I went out to start her and nothing. I got out the WD40 and did the same thing I’d been doing for weeks, pulling out the electrical plug, giving it a clean, spraying it and putting it back in again but this time it wasn’t working. We had no idea who to call or even how to find a mechanic and without Mandy it was one hell of a walk to the village to ask. I started to think about the problem and what could be happening to her. I went back to Mandy and pulled out the plug again, inside I could see a tiny orange rubber thing that seemed to be covering the metal prongs, I went and got my tweezers, put them inside the plug and pulled out the rubber thing. I could see that it was totally perished, I called Leon and showed him and he told me to put the plug in again minus the rubber thing and we’d see what happened. I covered my eyes and ears expecting Mandy to go bang but she started immediately. Leon and I just started laughing, it was going from a good day to an amazing one. Mandy never gave us a moment’s trouble from that day forward. The tiny stupid orange rubber plug had been the problem all along.
We spent the next few weeks getting all the things we needed together, the caravan was so full of stuff already and now there was a solar kit, wind turbine, buckets, tools, fittings etc weighing it down even more. We kept calling the sellers to see when we could move onto the farm. We were so desperate to leave the rented house and finally start our new life, they were reluctant to let us until the Spanish farmers’ contract was up. They had been trying to contact him but he was ignoring them. They finally agreed to let us move onto the farm a little bit early as long as we didn’t move into the house as it was full of his stuff. We weren’t sorry to be leaving the rented house at all, we just put the keys under the same mat we had found them under on our first day and left without even telling them we were going, they had treated us so badly we didn’t owe them anything. We said our sad goodbye’s to Paddy and his dogs, we were so upset to leave him as we had become very close over the last few months but he promised to come up and see us, he even spoke about selling up and moving so that he could be closer to us. We would have loved it if he had done that.
It was a long slow journey to reach the farm with the caravan being so heavy and the dogs once again vomiting in the back of the car but at least Mandy wasn’t giving us any trouble anymore so that was one less stress. We first went to the seller’s house and collected the keys, paid the deposit and the fee for the lawyer to draw up the contract then we had to work out where we were going to put the caravan. We decided to put it at the front of the house which was down a narrow track. Leon was ultra stressed after the journey but he managed to park the caravan in a great spot and get Mandy out of there at the same time. We put the dogs in the ground floor of the house and went to start emptying the caravan, we were going to put all our things into the cottage but when we opened the cottage door we were met by Oggie’s horse who was still living in there. We presumed he would have moved her, I called them and they asked if it would be ok to leave the horse living at the farm but we explained it was impossible with the dogs and we needed the cottage for storage. They agreed to come and move her the next day. We managed to juggle keeping the dogs in the ground floor and piling all our stuff in there so that we would be able to sleep in the caravan that night.
The caravan was only a two berth and you had to take the cushions from the sofa part to make the bed up in the night. You couldn’t really move in there once the bed was down but you could reach the shower room and the kitchen area. We spent the first night sleeping with the 6 dogs in bed with us, we didn’t have any fencing so we had to put them all on their leads and take them for a walk, it wasn’t so easy with so many of them but we managed. We woke up in the morning to silence, it was so quiet, we couldn’t hear any cars or neighbours, we made a coffee and sat outside the caravan taking in the view of our new home, it was a beautiful moment.
We had a huge journey ahead of us, we needed to find work and a way to pay for the farm, there was a lot of renovation to do on the property and it was very overgrown and neglected. Whenever I’ve encountered situations that have appeared to be too big for me to overcome I always think about eating the elephant. If you want to eat an elephant there is no way you would be able to do it in one go, you’d have to eat a little bit of him at a time until there was no more to eat. That’s the only way to eat an elephant and here we were just about to start nibbling on his toe.
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