Around 2 years ago at the start of 2019, my husband and I decided to put all our talk about the dream of living in the sunshine into action!
Sun Junkies
Both my husband and I have always been real sun junkies and love nothing more than feeling the constant heat of the sun on our bones. Lying around soaking up the vitamin D like a pair of lizards is our happy place. After having some serious withdrawals from spending 9 months travelling around SE Asia in 2017, and being sick of cold winters back in the UK, over a bottle of wine..... let's be honest it was 2 bottles.....we hatched our plan!
Taking a Gamble
So why Portugal? Well, I would love to tell you that this was a carefully considered and planned decision, especially as I'm in the business of promoting myself as a careful and effective planner being a Virtual Assistant, but I have to come clean and tell you the truth......
We initially thought we would return to one of the beautiful countries we travelled around in SE Asia and work as teachers. Darren, my husband would do a TEFL course and as I was already a qualified art teacher it made sense. Also, I had already been made aware of a possible opportunity of teaching in an international school in Cambodia where a good friend of mine from my art college days was head of the art department. So you can see why this idea made sense.
Open's second bottle of wine - here comes the curve ball.......
Although the plan to move to Cambodia seemed to be one that could really work out for us, we were also very conscious that we would be very far from my parents, who are in their late 70's and early 80's, and also I wasn't sure if I actually wanted to go back into teaching. I was currently in the process of starting up my new business as a caterer...yup I know confusing, but try and keep up it will all become apparent I promise.... so the thought of going back into teaching wasn't really appealing.
So very quickly our concentration moved closer to home. One of the big draws of living in SE Asia, amongst many others, was its cost of living. We needed to find a hot country closer to the U.K. that would enable us to live cheaply and achieve the work-life balance we were aiming for.
Now some might think we'd both been on holiday in Portugal and that is why we chose this beautiful country as our new home and yes, this would be the sensible reason, but were on bottle number 2 remember? Come on keep up....sorry I know it's not that easy with this story! I had been to Portugal....once, I went to Boom festival about 5 years previous and Darren had also, well stood on Portuguese land when he did a flight change over on route to Brazil many years previous. So it made perfect sense to move there right?! The decision was made and the next day we started to plan our road trip out there in our camper to go discover our new future homeland properly!
So there you have it, a Virtual Assistant with one very successful first year of being in the business of organising and planning for other businesses, planning her own life on a gamble! A gamble that has so far paid off BIG TIME!
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