On 26th June 2020 we packed our bags, again, and drove to Gatwick for our flight to Barcelona. We were nervous about whether we'd actually make it so we breathed a sigh of relief as the plane took off and headed over the English Channel. Our relief was short lived however as the captain came over the tannoy about 2 hours into the flight and announced the plane had developed a fault so we had to turn back, noooo! Due to COVID they weren't sure whether they could get it repaired in Barcelona so they wanted to get it back to home base. So back we went, deplaned, waited a few hours for its replacement and started all over again.
We landed in Barcelona late in the evening and cabbed it to our AirBnB, which we'd booked for a few weeks to give us time to find an apartment. It was bliss being back in Barcelona! We spent the first week re-familiarizing ourselves with the city, taking long walks by the beach, meandering through uncharastically empty streets and finding the best place for a Menu Del Dia we've ever had. The food was wonderful and with a wink, the owner always left the whole bottle of wine on the table from which to help myself. Very dangerous! Tom had his first day at work on the 6th of July, sitting behind a tiny desk in our tiny living room, and then the search for a job for me began. Those of you who know me know this is not my favourite pastime! I find it really stressful and to make matters worse, every company I talked to wanted a case study completing. Not being content with "good enough", I over-thought and over-worked all of them until I was exhausted.
We spent the evenings apartment hunting and we were lucky to find one pretty quickly. It was in Villa Olímpica, a few minutes walk from the sea, located in the little village built to house the athletes of the 1992 Olympic Games. The house was beautifully quiet with a nice outside space where we could weather another lockdown if it came to that. The only downside was that it was unfurnished so we'd need to buy a few bits and pieces, but nothing major. A week later we moved in then did about a thousand trips to IKEA to buy furniture. Due to COVID they had relatively little in stock and the home delivery timescales were weeks and weeks so we hired cars, got taxis, trains and busses and finally had a house which resembled a home. We even managed to repossess our 2 bikes having left them chained up in Badalona Marina when we left in 2018 - rusty but salvageable!
Meanwhile my interviews were progressing well and I had an offer on the horizon when my former boss from Schibsted contacted me asking whether I'd be interested in working for him again, this time remotely from Barcelona. I decided in under a millisecond and a few days later I was the extremely proud owner of a signed contract!
The final piece of this puzzle was of course Bon Bini. She was still hundreds of miles away gathering dust on her stands in Turkey. Considering we had no chance of returning to Marmaris anytime soon, we needed to get her back to us, and we missed her! We made a call to Van de Wetering, the fabulous transport company who brought her from Amsterdam to Barcelona in 2016, and asked whether they would do their magic for us again. Together with Jes, our project manager, they loaded Bon Bini onto the trailer, drove her to Istanbul, loaded her onto a "ro-ro" ferry across to France, unloaded then drove to Badalona Marina. Fun fact, this whole thing happened without us signing a single piece of paper or handing over any money!
Then the usual chaos ensued. The driver arrived early (in hindsight, I should have clarified what "We'll arrive on Tuehursday" actually meant) then the marina claimed they had no record of us wanting to unload. After a few hours she was safely back in the water, and our friends had come to the marina to welcome her back so that was the icing on the cake! It was only when she was at eye level again did we notice how absolutely filthy she was - she had enormous black boot marks from the Customers Officers who had boarded her in Turkey. We went to start the engine to move her into our berth but it was a dead as a dodo. Well, the battery was but thankfully our friends knew where we could get a new one so we raced there before it closed, installed it the engine purred into life. A few days later the rigging went back up and she was a proper boat again!
The following months were for us, as they were for many, rather uneventful. Barcelona enforced a curfew from October meaning we had to be inside from 22:00 to 06:00 and all the bars and restaurants were closed (disaster for us!) The days turned into weeks which turned into months. We walked, worked out, worked, drank wine, watched TV, became day-care for our neighbor's beautiful cat and that was about it. We managed a quiet Christmas with my parents, and had a lovely drive down from Barcelona to Malaga and back, stopping in a beautiful hotel for the night on the way home. 2021 started in much the same way as 2020 ended but in March the curfew finally lifted and Barcelona started coming back to life. We took full advantage and spent many a night eating out (outside) and took a few trips on the boat and by car, visiting areas of the coast we’d yet to see.
Hmm, now that I think about it, I actually started writing this post to tell you that Tom, Bon Bini and I have moved again, this time down to down to Andalucía in southern Spain. I'll leave the details of that for the next posting :)