The new world order.

Wow!  How the world has changed since my last post!  Sadly, like just about every one else, we are in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and find ourselves in an undreamed of situation. 

I will not writes loads on the subject of the virus, as I think there is already massive information overload, but will give a little detail on what life is like here for us during the pandemic.

We have been in full lockdown now for over two weeks, with big restrictions on movements and other significant measures prior to that.  As Madeira is a small island, with a population of around 270 thousand, I think it is easier for the local government to keep things under control than larger places, and feel that they are doing a pretty good job of it. They have acted decisively, sometimes before the Portuguese government has done so, and are actively keeping every one informed of the status. As of yesterday we had 43 confirmed cases of the virus, with only two in hospital and neither in intensive care.  The source of every case is known and all of their contacts are under surveillance and have been told to isolate themselves.

Since the middle of March all arrivals on the island have had to go into mandatory quarantine for 14 days.  Originally people were allowed to go home or to their hotels for this but it was quickly changed to them having to go to a specific location.  The first location was a 4* Resort, called Quinta do Lorde, which has it's own harbour, beaches, restaurants and shops at the Eastern end of the island away from any other houses.  It had been in financial difficulties and was empty so an ideal place to ship all arrivals. Clearly the guests don't get to enjoy the facilities as they are confined to their rooms, with meals delivered three times a day, but it is still a relatively pleasant place to be.  A further four or five hotels have now been commandeered for the same purpose but they have also now limited arrivals to 100 people per week.

We made a trip back to the UK at the end of February and beginning of March and fortunately returned before the quarantine rules were announced so could go home.  Sadly a visit by my sister due for the following week never happened, and goodness knows when visitors will be allowed to come again.  Just about all tourists have now been repatriated to their home countries so the tourist industry, the prime source of income for the island, no longer exists.  Also all but essential work has been stopped and people are being questioned by the Police if they are travelling around without fitting that category.  Restaurants are all closed except for for take-aways, and the only trips allowed are to buy foods, medicines or for essential workers to get to work.  As you can imagine, Funchal is almost a ghost town and I have great fears for all of the people who now have no income.

The online support networks for visitors and ex-pats here have gone into overdrive and have done a fantastic job of helping people to return home (whether here or elsewhere), keeping us informed of all of the developments (especially as there is a huge amount of information coming out which is, of course, in Portuguese) and generally keeping everyone in touch.  As always happens in times of crisis, humour is a brilliant way of helping people to deal with things and that is also a big part of the support.  I do not know if this bodes well for the future, but the man who will be out next door neighbour when our new house has been built has become the self-appointed online joker and has been inundating the site with an endless supply of terrible jokes and videos.  He clearly has access to the worst sources of "dad" jokes around.

We are keeping fine in our house and have enough to occupy ourselves.  I have numerous hobbies and, if anything, struggle to decide which to do at any one time.  I am delighted to say that I am putting the stuff I learned on my Bespoke Bra Making course, given to me as a leaving present by my work colleagues, to good use and am trying to make a perfectly fitted bra.  That is certainly a challenge. I also play the guitar, bake (with dire consequences for my waistline), practice my Portuguese, do the odd exercise DVD and generally keep myself busy.  We have even broken out the jigsaw puzzles! Also, Dave and I go for a local walk nearly every day (today is the first exception in ages as it is raining).  These walks are not always that far, maybe 2 to 3 miles, but due to the topography of the area, they always involve a lot of hill climbing.  Yesterday our walk was 1.7 miles long, but involved an upward elevation change of 600 ft, the equivalent of 60 flights of stairs!  The picture below is the view we got at the top. Sadly driving to the countryside for walks outside town is banned, and all of the public walks, including levada walks, have been closed to avoid people congregating.

I can see my house from here

Anyway, that is a snapshot of life here at the moment.  We desperately miss our daughters who both live and work in London, and at a time like this, wish we were still in the UK with them.  The eldest has been working from home and, allowing for the inevitable frustrations that involves, seems to be getting on fine.  The younger daughter has had a more traumatic time of it as she works in online retail of personalised accessories.  A large part of her work has to be done at the premises so she cannot do much work from home.  Her boss refused to let her do any at home so she has had to continue to go into work every day.  In general this was fine as she cycled in, respected all social distancing and hygiene rules, and minimised her risk to herself or others.  Unfortunately that was not enough for her landlady, who refused to let her go to work in case she exposed herself (and therefore her landlady) to the virus.  Therefore her stark choice became to lose her job or to lose her home.  Despite the protections that have been put in place for employees and tenants, very little was of help to her and both parties went to great lengths to point out the legality of their demands.  After an extremely difficult few days, and numerous set-backs, she has finally moved out of her house, temporarily, and into a friend's flat which was empty.  She is now settling in but has to motor-cycle to work which comes with its own risks.  Ironically, it may only be a matter of time before her boss has to cease trading if the government introduce more stringent measures like we have here in Madeira. I think it is very sad that the one thing lacking in the way she was treated by both parties seemed to be compassion.  As we all know, crises bring out the best and worst in people.  As a counter, she was given some fantastic support, especially by a couple of her friends, and we were also helped by others, with advice and suggestions, as we tried to help her through the situation.  And I am enormously proud of the way she held up, adapting as the situation seemed to change by the minute, and drawing on her inner strength to keep in control.

I think that is more than enough for now.  As with all of us, this awful virus dominates our lives and leaves us thinking of little else.  I just hope that the crisis passes swiftly, and that it will not be long before we are through the worst of it and, hopefully, moving forward into a kinder world where we look out for each other more and take less for granted.  We have the opportunity to learn a lot about ourselves, as well as how to deal with a world wide crisis like this if it ever happened again, and I hope that we do not waste it.

Stay safe.

It's been a while

OK, firstly, huge apologies to anyone who has looked in hoping for an update and found that I haven't posted anything.  It was as if I left the UK and disappeared off the face of the earth.  I don't have any excuse - I just haven't been keeping my blog up to date!

Anyway, having heard from a friend that she had been reading my blog the other day, I have been shamed into finally writing an update on my life.

I left us in my last post in the hotel at Gatwick, ready to start our Madeiran adventure early the next morning so we'll take it from there. 

We got up to wet and dismal weather on our leaving day, which seemed rather fitting.  Here's the view from the plane:

The flight was uneventful, but my emotions were all over the place.  I was crying as hard as the rain as we took off, and felt as though the bottom had fallen out of my world.  An hour or so later Dave and I were celebrating over a glass of champagne.  I suppose the impact of what we were doing was finally hitting home, both the good and the bad of it.

I can see my house from here.

We were met at the airport by a chauffeur-driven car supplied by the company who will be building our future house, and driven to our existing house in Funchal, the capital of Madeira. It was a strange feeling arriving there for the first time as our home, not just on holiday.

And the view from my doorstep

The next couple of weeks were something of a honeymoon period for us as we waited for our possessions to arrive.  We ate out a lot, revisiting many of our favourite restaurants, and even cooked at home a few times.  We had the advantage of the house already being well equipped as it has been our holiday home for over ten years, but I hadn't brought enough clothes and was getting very bored with recycling the same few shorts and T shirts.  Fortunately the weather was glorious so we didn't need that many clothes, and the house has a washing machine.

During the first week or so we popped into the local health centre to register for our health numbers, and commenced the processes of importing the Lamborghini and ensuring that we were correctly registered here for tax purposes.  This was the start of our experience of the joys of Portuguese bureaucracy, an experience which has had us endlessly frustrated ever since!  As an example, four months later, we are still awaiting our health numbers which should have been issued within a couple of weeks.  The car is still going through the import process, although we have succeeded in leaping over several major hurdles for that.  We only got our tax situation sorted out just before Christmas after resorting to the assistance of a lawyer, as some paperwork had got stuck in someone's in-tray and was not being processed (a recent change moving the processing from Lisbon to Madeira meant that the clerk had not had to deal with our situation before so it ended up in her "too difficult - maybe some other time" pile!).  There have been numerous other situations like these but we are gradually learning to relax and go with the flow, especially as the stock answer to any complaint is "that's just how they do it here".

Another thing we did as soon as we arrived was to get into a routine of going for regular walks.  The island is laced with irrigation channels, called Levadas, which go for miles and most have paths beside them for maintenance and for hikers to walk along.  You can often walk for hours, through the most beautiful scenery, and barely meet another soul.  Also there are numerous mountain walks which can be pretty challenging but which reward you with the most spectacular views.  We have been going for at least one long walk a week, often taking a picnic lunch, and have enjoyed a mixture of familiar and new walks since we arrived.  Here's a taste:

We also immediately got to work at reacquainting ourselves with friends we have made out here over the years. They include Pip and Dave, our British neighbours who have helped us out over the years with things like keeping the garden in check.  Another is Miguel, a Madeiran who works as a waiter in a town centre restaurant and we have become friends over numerous visits to his restaurant.  We met him at the local beach and popped around to his house for coffee, coincidentally very close to where we will be living in the future.  That was around 2 pm and we finally extracted ourselves, after several bottles of wine and a meal with his extended family, at 11.30 that night!  It was a wonderful introduction to the famous Madeiran hospitality.

It is important to us that we quickly build a social network so, as well as catching up with existing friends, we attended a few social events where we got the chance to make some new friends. The first was Trafalgar Night which is an annual event held at the "Liga dos Combatentes" (league of combatants) very much following the tradition of the UK version, but with Madeira wine instead of Port.  We also attended a British Legion dinner commemorating Remembrance, at the invitation of our Portuguese teacher, and a dinner held by a Facebook group called Madeira Active which has a big community of both Madeirans and expats (of all nationalities) who socialise, discuss every subject you can imagine and generally support each other.

As you may have picked up, we have a Portuguese teacher so, yes, we have started lessons.  We go twice a week to lessons for just the two of us at a little school in town and seem to be progressing pretty well.  We did start lessons in the UK many years ago but, lack of use and a less imperative need meant we forgot most of it.  Now we have much more motivation to learn, although we do constantly face the situation where we try to talk Portuguese and they talk back in English!  As tourism is the major industry here a huge proportion of people speak at least some English.  This means that there are some expats we have met who have been here for years and still not learnt more than the basics, as they have not needed to.  We are determined not to fall into that category.  I want to be able to converse in their language, rather than expecting them to do so in ours, and of course the challenge of learning a new language is extremely good for the old brain cells.

I'll stop here and post this now.  I have much more to catch up on but don't want my posts to be too massive.  I won't leave it so long to the next update - I promise.

The final countdown

This will be my last post about leaving the UK, but I thought I'd cover a bit more about the process before moving onto life in Madeira.

The last two weeks before we left were totally exhausting. We were getting up early and sorting things until 1 or 1.30am before crashing into bed to start the whole thing again a few hours later.  Even though we had packers, we had to make sure that we identified anything we did not want to come with us.  On top of that, some of our stuff was going to our house in Madeira, and some was going into storage for our new house when it is built, so we had to ensure everything was appropriately marked for the packers.  We used a system of coloured labels but I have a suspicion that they were not always followed correctly.  When our stuff finally arrives I will not be surprised if things end up in the wrong place.  I know that some stuff that was meant to remain was packed (for example plumbing spares for the "old" house) and will be turning up where we have no use for it!

The packers arrived on the Tuesday before our flight, and from then everything was a complete whirlwind.  They were incredibly efficient and I suspect that if either of us stood still too long we'd have been packed too!

We had no say in the order in which they packed rooms, so the kitchen and all of its equipment was done very early on leaving us no way to prepare any food.  This meant that the only way to eat was to walk into town and buy something there.  Our lovely friends Tony and Eniko kindly let us stay with them from Wednesday night onwards as our bed had been packed too.

On Thursday, several hours later than expected, a 40ft container arrived outside the house and the packers shifted everything into it.  Well, nearly everything, as they realised quite quickly that there would not be room for the two motorcycles.  Dave ended up having to make alternative arrangements with someone he knows who specialises in transporting motorcycles overseas.

In the middle of all of the packing, on the Wednesday, we finally exchanged on our house.  The process, in hindsight, was pretty quick, but it was none-the-less, very stressful and you never feel it really will happen until you have that confirmation.  It was a weight off our minds to know that we would not be having to sell an empty house from abroad.

The container was packed up and sealed, and it looked like we had filled every square inch of it.  By the time it was done the driver had exceeded his driving hours so ended up sleeping in the cab outside our house for the night, leaving early the next day.  We left the house looking a little desolate (us and the house), but then had a lovely meal out with Tony and Eniko and our friends and neighbours, Robert and Julia. It was a great evening but also a reminder of how much we are going to miss everyone.

On Friday, we returned to the house to supervise the transfer of the last few pieces of furniture to friends and charities and to do as much cleaning and tidying as we could.  Also the purchasers popped around for what Dave called "house training"!  It is a large and complicated house so we wanted to help the buyers know how to operate the various systems and to make their move in as smooth as possible.  They strike us as people who will love and enjoy the house as we did, and that makes us feel a little better about leaving it.

My friend Shreena decided that, as we had never been to an acclaimed local restaurant in all the time we had lived there, she was not going to let us go without doing so.  Therefore we had a great lunch out with her, and got back to the house just in time to supervise the loading of the bikes into a van for their separate journey.  After a bit more cleaning we were picked up by Eniko and went back to theirs for another exhausted night.

Saturday, our last day in the UK, was a very emotional one.  We took the girls out to lunch and (bravely) they came back to the house for one last look around.  Then we waved them off amid many tears. An hour or so later some other friends, Sati and Rob, came around to pick us up and take us to Gatwick.  We had a lovely meal out with them before they dropped us off at the Premier Inn for our last night as UK residents.

And then there were two.....

We have now been in Madeira for 10 days and are getting more relaxed and less stressed as we fit into a new rhythm of life.

In my last post I said that our move has been both physically and emotionally demanding and I'll now elaborate a bit.

By far the biggest and most difficult aspect of our whole move overseas has been the fact that our two daughters have not come with us.  They are both in their mid-twenties so they need to forge their own lives and careers, within the UK or elsewhere, rather than having us dictate to them.  Until a couple of months ago, both were still living with us so our move, and the sale of our house, meant that they had to find new accommodation.  They get on well but the idea of living together was not really an option so both have found rented accommodation which suits their individual lifestyles.  Corina, the eldest, is now sharing a flat with a friend from her church, and Tania is living in a house with the owner/landlady.

Moving the girls into their new places has been strenuous and logistically demanding but we got there in the end.  Corina's move involved "two men and a van", as well as a car load, as she was in the fortunate position of being able to take some of her own furniture with her.  In fact, she even supplied some furniture for her flat mate.  This has had the double benefit of her keeping her familiar and comfortable furniture, and us not having to find new homes or storage for it.  As Corina has previously lived away from home for college and work, the transition, although painful, was not too shocking for any of us.  One victim was Dave's head though, as he ended up with a nasty cut on it caused when dismantling her landlord's old unwanted wardrobe.

Tania, on the other hand, had never lived away from home before as she stayed at home throughout her time at college.  Therefore the arrangement where she is in an established house feels more comfortable for her (and us). Sadly she could not take much of her furniture with her.  Our original plan had been to store it for her but that proved to be ridiculously expensive so we agreed that we would bring her bed out here (as we needed another one) so she can use it when she is here, and sell or give away her desk, wardrobe and bedside table.  When she buys her own place we will buy her a new bed and other pieces.  We had one piece of furniture which she particularly wanted to keep, an art deco display cabinet, and some kind friends of ours are looking after it for her, along with a couple of sculptures she had asked to keep.

That brings me onto how generous our friends and neighbours have been as we have been going through the whole move.  We definitely left on a wave of love and support from them all, with practical and emotional support in abundance.  We can't thank them enough for all they have done for us, and for their good wishes and kind thoughts.  We even have a sideboard full of new home cards here as a reminder.

We also had to say goodbye to our extended families, some of whom we sadly may not see again.  For Dave's side of the family we were lucky to be able to see almost all of them over one weekend as his Aunt and Uncle who live in Spain were over celebrating a big birthday, followed by celebrating a milestone birthday of one of his nieces the next day. We got to see his aunt and uncles, sister, cousins, nieces and nephews and even a great niece, plus numerous in-laws and partners. For my side, I arranged a meal out with my three sisters, who all live in West Sussex, plus partners and as many of their children as could make it.  Those who couldn't phoned in for chats during the evening. The only family I failed to catch up with was my brother's as he lives in Cheshire and I felt it was too far to ask him to come.  We did see them all in May so it was not too long ago.

I also managed to have a drink and meal out with most of my closest ex-colleagues. It was great to catch up with them and hear some office gossip.

Going back to the emotional side of leaving, I confess that, although I knew that leaving the girls would be tough, I was not at all prepared for the massive wrench it is turning out to be.  First the pain of them leaving home in quick succession, followed by us selling the house that they largely grew up in, and finally us leaving them behind as we flew off to our new lives.  Although, with communications and transport being so available nowadays we are constantly in contact and we are really only a few hours apart, it still feels like a chasm sometimes though.  Many tears have been shed and I miss them dreadfully.

I'll tell you about the rest of the move in my next post as this is already long enough.  No photos I'm afraid as I don't really have any suitable.  There will be some in the next post.  See you there.

We made it!

Well here I am, writing from Madeira.  We have actually taken the plunge and are now living here full time, as of last Sunday!

The last couple of months have been incredible in so many ways, and have left me with very little time to write up my blog.  But now we are here and things have quietened down (temporarily) I will try to catch up.  It will probably take a few posts to bring things up to date.

My last blog was posted just after we dropped our Lamborghini off in Madeira and headed home to get on with packing up our house.  We had put the house on the market at the beginning of July and immediately got a lot of interest and some offers, although below our asking price.  After around 15 viewings a lovely young couple with a little girl looked around and, within an hour, phoned up with an acceptable offer.  Then it was over to the surveyors, lawyers and estate agent to work through the whole process.  As anyone who has bought or sold a house will know, even the most straightforward of sales is a slow, painful and frustrating process and ours was no exception, even though there was no chain and no major issues.

While the house sale was working its way through Dave and I continued to sort and de-clutter as much as we could.  I ended up selling a large amount of clothes and other items on eBay, which is time consuming and sometimes demoralising, but meant at least I got occasional bouts of exercise dropping parcels off at the Post Office.  We continued to try to place as much of our furniture as we could with people who had need of it.  As we already have a fully furnished house in Madeira, there was only a limited amount of furniture that we planned to take with us.

On occasion it seemed as though some guiding force was helping us, as we often found good homes for items just when we needed to.  For example, when the mechanic who maintains one of Dave's motorcycles was dropping it off in his van, Dave asked him if he knew of anyone needing some furniture.  By amazing coincidence, his son was just buying his first house and would happily take several items.  So the van went away with a wardrobe, bedside table, chest of drawers, dining room table and numerous other items.

We were delighted that the buyers wanted to buy our piano and some gym equipment which would have been very heavy to move, although they didn't want our snooker table.  We had an arrangement for that with the person who supplied it but that fell through at the last minute.  Dave put it on eBay on a 3 day listing and, luckily, someone wanting one just like ours happened to see the ad and buy it.  He's a builder and drove all the way up from Torquay in his flat bed truck, with wife and son in tow, to pick it up within a couple of days.  Similarly, we needed to sell our car (not the Lambo) and there was very little interest apart from some insultingly low offers. And then, when we were about to give up hope, a local couple turned up, loved it and bought it on sight.

We found a couple of charities who were happy to collect other items of furniture which was useful as our car, when we had it, was pretty tiny.  Also some of our neighbours wanted a few items so people staggering along the road carrying chairs, sideboards and cabinets became quite a regular sight.

That is a brief description of the practical side of preparing for our move.  I'll cover some of the more emotional issues in my next post.

The picture at the top is the sunset as seen from our garden on the day we arrived - to explain why this is all so worth it!

The Bull has landed...

Fifty years after Apollo 11 landed a manned vessel on the moon, an alien craft lands on the island of Madeira!  Yes, we have arrived with the Lamborghini at last.  It was quite a journey over 7 days and 2,700 km.  We stayed two nights with friends in Normandy, followed by a night in Bordeaux, one near Segovia in Spain and one in Alentejo in Portugal.  Each was lovely in its own way, as were many of the roads between them.

As planned, we picked up a second, more sensible car in Portugal and I drove that for the last couple of days.  It wasn't as bad as I had anticipated, once I had stopped grazing my left hand knuckles on the door every time I went to change gear, and helped by largely quiet roads. Also Dave is a good lead driver as he only overtakes when there is enough space for me too.  I feel a bit guilty that he had to drive at a more sedate pace than he normally would, on some lovely roads, so he could keep me in view.  The car was supplied by the father/father-in-law of another couple of friends, and they kindly hosted us for lunch at his beautiful villa before we set off for the next stage of our journey.

We arrived at the port of Portimao in good time for our ferry which set off perfectly on time at 2pm.  The journey took 25 hours so we had booked a cabin which was right at the front of the ship.  We were just settling into the journey, waving goodbye to the Algarve over a beer, when Dave started to suffer from a dreadful bout of seasickness.  Sadly he suffered for pretty well the whole journey, so it turned out to be a little less romantic than we had hoped.  I kept him company or wandered around the boat, managing to turn up at the restaurant when it was just closing. Fortunately I wasn't particularly hungry so did not mind missing my evening meal. Dave was not eating anything!  A kind Madeiran saw Dave's plight during one of his rare trips to get some fresh air, and gave him some travel sickness pills which didn't help the sickness but did help him sleep through it.  I'm relieved to say that he had recovered enough to drive by the time we arrived.

Dave's seasickness has confirmed what we already thought, that we will actually ship the motorbike to Madeira in our removal crate rather than ride it.  We realise it is just too much time, money and energy to expend a second time.

We pulled into Funchal at 3pm on Wednesday 16 July and, by some amazing luck, I was the second car off the ship.  I parked to one side to wait for Dave, as he had been on a different deck and got off around 10 minutes later, and was met by Nelio, the builder who will be building our future house, and his marketing manager Robert.  They will garage the Lambo at their office until they have built our new one.  Much to our amazement the Lamborghini had already become a Facebook phenomenon by the time we arrived, as people had photographed it at Portimao, and some were speculating on whether it was headed for Madeira or Tenerife where the ship was going onto.  Several people seemed to claim they owned it too!

Once at the port the BMW was parked in the nearby CR7 car park (yes, not only have the Madeirans named their airport after their famous son, Cristiano Ronaldo, but they have also named a car park after him!) so that I could join Dave for the Lambo's first trip on the island.  It certainly did cause a stir as we went along.  My worry is that people will have accidents staring at the car instead of the road!

Now the car is housed at the builder's office until our new house is built.  Dave took Nelio for a brief drive before washing it and putting it to bed.  Even that became a spectator sport! Our car is rapidly gaining celebrity status on the island.

We then had four busy days talking to the builder, looking at building sites, and meeting our tax advisor who is helping us import the car.  It is apparently a very laborious process with pitfalls all along but, for us, worth the effort to have our car on the beautiful island with us.  We popped by to visit our plot but got sidetracked by our future neighbours and a very large gin and tonic.  The future looks very promising....

Now I am back home and we are on the final straight before moving out there for good.  The house is on the market and has had around 10 viewings so far.  Dave has booked the packers to pack up and move our possessions, and our one way flight out.  Yes, we have a leaving date!  It will be 29 September.  I am just about to list a load of items to sell online and we have had two mega-trips to charity shops with one more to go.  Now that we have a deadline it has really focussed our attention on what still needs to be done.

One last bit of news.  My younger daughter, Tania, passed her motorcycle test last week and has now taken possession of her brand new bike.  I am so proud of her.

What a whirlwind....

Hello, another apology for taking so long to post again.  I've been rather busy and there hasn't been that much exciting to tell you about really.

The main things occupying my time are sorting, tidying, throwing stuff out and, er, more sorting.  In the past month Dave has finished the decorating and we have had new carpets fitted to a large part of the house to make it more attractive to potential buyers.  It seems a bit mad to spend a load on something that we will benefit from for such a short period, but there is no doubt it will help to bring in the right buyers. We've had several estate agents come around and have chosen one.  Our house will officially be on the market in the next few days!  I am in a quandary of mixed emotions about that as I love this house so much, and a big part of me really does not want to leave it.  Also, of course, as the time to leave gets closer, the reality of leaving our two daughters behind is starting to hit me.

We did fit in a family holiday to Italy last week.  We spent 5 days near the beautiful lake Orta (the smallest one) and then 3 days in Bologna.  At that point Dave and I came home leaving the girls so spend a couple of days without us in Milan.  They are safely home again now and both had to go back to work immediately.  We had a lovely time, and did manage to relax a bit, although we always end up driving around a lot on this type of holiday.  Highlights included a dip in the lake, a visit to lake Como (no we didn't see George), some totally spectacular views, and the walk up to the Sanctuary of the Madonna de San Luca in Bologna.  And, of course, the food!  This may be our last family holiday of this type, but I hope not.

As I mentioned in my last blog, car prices in Portugal are very high, even for older cars.  Dave has been doing a lot of research and sourced a 1 series BMW at a "reasonable" price through a friend who lives near Lisbon (and who has a car dealer for a father-in-law!) which he has now bought.  This means that we will be collecting a second car on our way to the ferry next week and taking two cars across to Madeira.  A great idea in principal but I am rather dreading it as I will have to drive the new car from Lisbon to the port and this will be my first experience of driving a left hand drive car and of driving in Portugal.  I just hope that the roads are both wide and quiet!

Dave has also been on a bit of a spending spree buying things that are difficult or very expensive to get in Madeira.  Purchases so far include numerous large items of kitchen equipment, a robot mower for the lawn that we do not yet have, a clothes airer, various pieces of hifi and probably lots of other stuff I have forgotten.  We have had a couple of quotes for moving our possessions to Madeira and it appears that we will need most of a 40ft container, so Dave is determined to make full use of it!

I think that brings you up to date now.  Our next trip is the car trip starting on 11 July so I will post again either before or after that.

In the meantime, I though you would like to see that the "Happy Retirement" balloon that my colleagues gave me is still hanging on in there, three months after they gave it to me.  It is currently hovering at around 3 feet off the ground.  Here is the evidence: