Shattered and Shorn

Finally!

This post is brought to you by a homeless couple. We’ve been a bit quiet since our last trip as we didn’t want to jinx anything after two house sale fails – but we can now announce that we moved out yesterday into….Vince. We haven’t found our dream house yet so all our worldlies are in storage for the time being, and we’ve created a little bit of home in the big fella.

It’s been an exhausting couple of weeks as we moved everything to the storage unit ourselves using the car, just hiring a van for the big stuff. One of our lovely neighbours has offered the use of their drive for our car for as long as we need it. It’s also been very emotional leaving the home where we brought up our children; I don’t mind admitting that a few tears have been shed along the way, but we still have our memories and a million photos to keep us going.

I can’t believe how much stuff you can get in a space the size of a single garage if you pack it efficiently. I’m talking about man-packing of course due to our superior spatial awareness. (I suspect I’ll pay for that comment later).

So what now? No really…what now? We have no idea what happens next – worrying, scary and exciting all at the same time. You have to challenge yourself in life but it’s possible to take these things too far! We’ve been hanging around since April going through those failed house sales so item 1 on the agenda is a bit of time away. We had to be out of the house by 1pm yesterday, so after tearful goodbyes to our fantastic neighbours we had a short drive to Shrewsbury where we parked up on a pub car park to say our farewells to our besties over a meal and a few drinks.

I walked into town this morning for a much-needed haircut (there may be pics later on so I have to look my best) before hitting the road to Clevedon in North Somerset. We’re parked in the Golf Club car park and when chatting to the locals we were told that Broadchurch was filmed in the town. We didn’t watch it ourselves but I believe it featured a cliff, some beaches, a murder and that Scottish fella from the TARDIS. We must get round to catching up with it some time. This is just a one-night stop over on our way to Plymouth in the morning. Our ferry sails to Spain tomorrow afternoon where we’ll tour some new places in both Spain and Portugal as well as revisiting some of our favourites from our tour last summer when all this blogging malarkey started.

The tuning on our crystal ball is a bit faulty as it only predicts as far as January; we return to the UK mid-December to visit our girlies and then to head to our in-laws. We’re in charge of Christmas this year at Gill’s parents’ house in return for a roof, some heating and proper plumbing. Early January will see us cat-sitting (not literally, those claws are sharp) in Saltaire for two weeks and then…and then… we have no idea. If we see a decent house online we’ll go for it; we may spend some time helping Gill’s sis and husband with their renovation project and we may just pop over the channel to explore a bit more. Trust me – you’ll be the first to know.

We’re away for six weeks, so clear your in-boxes subscribers; there’s going to be a flood of VincentVanGone drivel coming your way very soon! For now it’s radio silence while we cross the Bay of Biscay (pass the seasick bag, Captain) and we’ll be back in touch from our next campsite. Or aire. Or lay-by. Ok ok, so planning hasn’t been our strong point for this trip but we have been very busy you know!

See you (literally) on the other side xxx