Getting to Our New Hometown

On The Road Again, but this time there is no road for most of the way.

Making the decision to move to another country is one thing and actually doing the move is another.  For the two years that this move was in the planning stages, I envisioned flying to Madrid and hassling with luggage and likely have some extra items shipped to us once we found a place to live.

But this story is really about how friends - new ones found along the way and old ones - contribute to the fabric of life.  Just read how many people were involved in our getting settled in Astorga.

In 2016, after I had walked the Camino and Ann came to meet me, we enjoyed a nice meal at the creperie next to the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela where we met a retired couple that spends a few months in Europe every year via a relocation cruise and a short-term car lease giving them the freedom to roam around Europe.  They gave me the cruise ship idea, and after doing some research, I decided that this was a good option.

The 14-day route to Spain

Relocation (or repositioning) cruises are one-way trips that enable cruise ships to relocate from, in our case, the Caribbean to the Mediterranean markets.  They do this in April, and in November they sail back.  In order to fill the ship, they offer very low fares.  It is a full-service cruise so all day and into the night there were things to do and eat.  We got off the ship and roamed around in Key West, Canary Islands (La Palma and Tenerife, 2 days), and Malaga.  We had a good time at each place as well as on days at sea.  Low pressure and each city was a new place for us.

You can read more about our impressions of cruise ship travel in this previous post written from the boat. If you think that this kind of travel is for you, just google 'relocation cruise' and begin reading about what will be available again one day soon.

Table 78

Of course, I had to make new friends on the two-week cruise.  The post called Table 78 gives you some feeling for how that worked.  We continue to be in touch with Cynthia and Jesús who have just moved to his childhood home in near-by Galacia just in time to be here for the Quedarse en Casa (stay at home) time.  They came to visit us here in Astorga and we went to visit them in Santiago de Compostela last year.  Being professional language teachers they were a great help in getting us some primary vocabulary and understanding of life in Spain.  And they are fun, of course. They are the couple standing on the right in the photo.

The cruise ended in Barcelona, a large and beautiful city in northeast Spain.  My original plan was to take the train from Barcelona to Astorga, but as we looked at all the luggage we had on the ship, I decided that renting a car would be a better solution.  I'll summarize that we got here and returned the car to the office in León, 30 miles down the road.  I haven't driven in Spain since then, I am comfortable with walking and the public transportation system and using taxis which have been great when necessary like when the kids and grandkids visit.  We have a driver-friend in a nearby village who has an 8 passenger van and is very easy to communicate with.

I had reserved an AirBnB apartment for a week when we arrived to give us some time to look at apartments for rent.  The host of that place, Mery, was very helpful in getting roots here.  She and her English speaking sister-in-law and all their kids met us for coffee and a discussion of finding an apartment.  They also introduced us to María, who became our friend and language teacher, and Steve and Cathy, an American couple living in Astorga doing church planting and then María introduced us to Mary, another language professional married to Enrique, a Spanish man. With those introductions, we were friends with all the Americans in the town.  And it seemed that we met all these new friends in about one week and they all helped us to get started here. 

But finding an apartment was not so easy.  The small number of foreign residents here meant that landlords were not so comfortable renting to people they were not so sure about legally and language-wise. And perhaps some foreigners had behaved badly in the past.  We have gained the love of our neighbors and our landlord now, but it does take some time.

But I knew that there was a place for us, and it required our second AirBnB host, Raquel.  Mery's  place was booked by others so we had to get a new place to live. We spent a few days visiting Santiago de Compostela and returned to another AirBnB hosted by Raquel. When we told Raquel what we were looking for she went to work finding us a place too. 

We looked at a couple of unsuitable-for-us places and then she remembered a friend that had been estranged from her husband and they had gotten back together so had an apartment she no longer needed. 

It was in a perfect location, only two bedrooms (we were looking for three so kids could stay with us) but the landlord was willing as the previous resident went to bat for us.  I am sitting in that apartment now writing this blog.  We love it. 

Ann wants a garden and a place to do stone carving so we are looking for our next place with a yard or large terrace space.  But for the first year, this place was good and I feel sure that the right place will appear to us. As those of you ho follow us on Facebook know, this is the view of the Cathedral from our apartment.

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The Other Jew today is Yitzhak Ahronovitch, the captain of the refugee ship Exodus, whose violent interception by the British Navy as it tried to take thousands of Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1947 helped rally support for the creation of the state of Israel the next year, died in December 2009 in northern Israel. He was 86.