16th May CASTELO BRANCO

I know I like to complain but I will also give credit where it’s due; we contacted our British bank, Intelligent Finance, on Wednesday (to transfer the deposit to estate agents) and on Thursday (to transfer money to our new Portuguese bank account) they said that the money would leave our bank 11.00 a.m. the following day and could take up to 3 working days to reach Portugal – in both cases the money arrived the same day it left Britain, I was very surprised and impressed.

The estate agent seemed to think that we might be able to exchange by the end of the week, she said that Liliana (her secretary) would make some phone calls (to: the owner, the notary, our lawyer etc), to coordinate the exchange, and ring us this afternoon – oh dear, she didn’t! If she hasn’t contacted us by Friday we’ll go back in to talk to them.

Today we had a lovely drive to Fundao; the town is quite high up and overlooks a huge flat plain with lots of small farming communities. The region is known for cherry growing (it has a special microclimate), the cherries are just starting to ripen, I can’t wait they’re one of my favourite fruits; Fundao will be our local town when we move; it has a ‘Lidl’ so Brett’s happy as he’ll be able to get English tea.

The trip was to look for a truck, I am so bored with looking at vehicles; our first stop was Mitsubishi. Brett told the salesman that our budget was 25000€; he gave us a price of 27000€ for the deluxe model (Mitsubishi L200) and the basic (work) model he got down to 24900€, both with a tow bar and load liner thrown in. They did have a couple of second hand trucks one was 3 years old and he could let us have it for 25500€ (no tow bar or load liner, and 70000 kilometres on the clock) or an 8 year old for 18500€ but with 168000 kilometres and no warranty. We found another garage with some older trucks but even the 12 years olds were still priced at 12000€; vehicles are classed as a luxury here and they keep their value, Brett reckons they depreciate by 1000€ a year, not like Britain where a 1/3 of the value goes in the first couple of years  – bottom line is we still don’t know what to do (NO, we do not want to travel by donkey, speaking of which we had great difficulty persuading the estate agents that we didn’t want to keep the donkey who lives at the farm).