We hadn’t actually decided on Europe for our travel plans until about 7 or so months before leaving, we knew we wanted to do something different and for a while we talked about travelling Australia, which we both would have loved but when Grant said out loud that we could do Europe, I didn’t realise then that that would be a possibility, I was sold on the idea straight away..once Europe was an option I started searching accommodation, places, countries…I knew Spain and Portugal would be our starting point.

We decided that we would learn Spanish, we talked about the history, the thought of us all learning whilst travelling was such a huge pull..

I was so excited, now we just needed the house to sell, we put the house on the market in August privately after a long time doing it up, and thought it would sell straight away, but that did not happen, i wasn’t going to wait so we booked our flights for Nov and decided if it was meant to sell it will, we had to hand the house over to the real estate agent and hoped again it would go soon, but in the end it didn’t sell until July, when we were in Estoril (Lisbon) we changed agency and the house sold in the first open home.  We didn’t get as much as we were hoping for it, but we were just so relieved we didn’t have to worry about it anymore.  we were finally free from the mortgage and rates…