Today is the day. Honestly, every day is the day, today is just more obvious, as it is the potential culmination of a dream. How exciting, how very exciting. How skin tingling, heart racingly, dreams can come true exciting. I hope I am conveying that we have woken up this morning excited because we have.
The dream of having our own piece of land to park TUT on, to just live and be. To grow stuff, to watch the seasons, to take in the view. A piece of land to build our dream home on. A stationary point on which to continue the journey.
I have been restless through the night. It is fair to say that even though we know whatever happens today it will work out okay, this does not change my basic human emotions. Today is an adrenaline filled massive possibility of a day and should be celebrated as such.
We are in Oledo for the final time, an overnight parking spot that has served us so well on this adventure. As we set off for Castelo Branco, we nervously chat about life, the Universe and everything. Even we have been truly staggered by the pace of this adventure. This was not the plan, and this is why it’s best not to worry about the plan. Just set the destination and take those baby steps, and don’t worry about the timing.
We arrive in Castelo Branco early and head to Amicini’s for breakfast and to just relax. Can you be excited and calm simultaneously? That is how I am feeling. We take the short saunter over to Liliana, our lawyer’s office. She is currently at the bank sorting out the transfer for the purchase and payments to the various authorities.
This is all happening so smoothly, it goes against almost everything that we have read online. In Portugal, many rural plots of land have been inherited so they are part-owned by several members of one family. We are dealing with one entity not four or five as it might have been. The price is agreed. The lawyer has done all the necessary checks. No dramas, no nightmares. Maybe that is because we have used highly recommended experts for each stage instead of trying to do that ourselves. Maybe it is because we aren’t totally concerned with outcomes but just enjoying the journey. Probably it is a combination of both of those things.
Liliana returns from the bank, and we walk together to the notary’s office. Paulo, the estate agent, is already there as he’s been given power of attorney to sign for the seller. Twenty minutes later we are all done and dusted, and Kimberley and I go on a hunt for a celebratory ice cream. We have our dream land. It feels a little surreal.
We pick up food for our first official meal in our old home called TUT (the campervan) on our new land called CasaBo. Then after supper, we are honoured to be invited by the Expats Portugal team to be interviewed on their Thursday night show. As regular readers know, this YouTube channel helped us immeasurably in our preparations for this trip. It is a wonderful international community, and we highly recommend listening to Carl Munson in the mornings. This guy loves Portugal and is the Chris Evans of the English-speaking breakfast show here.
Interview over, we sit on our land, just being. This place is special and CasaBo is something that we intend to share with others. It’s a place for relaxation, restoration and rejuvenation. Somewhere you can come and sit and think and just be. It has been so exciting to have reached this point that I kind of don’t want to move on right now.
However, the next part of the adventure promises to be just as exciting. I love a good movie misquote and right now one springs readily to mind. The one from Fields of Dreams seems most apt:
“Build it and they will come.”
A famous misquote from ‘Field of Dreams’
Well, let me tell you, whether they come or not, we are definitely going to start taking baby steps to build our dream home. What a fantastic day.