I found a stone house online this past week. It’s in a small village somewhere in central Portugal, and since the advertisement was posted recently enough, I have a suspicion that the photographs truly reflect reality.
The house is built from granite stone (unlike the picture that I have picked for illustrating this post!) with moss, lichens, and even ferns growing everywhere. The green stuff covers the external stairs and the main doorway, so it does not take a massive imagination to transform the building into Sleeping Beauty’s castle, albeit without the towers and the dungeons.
It’s not expensive by any stretch of the imagination, either, although there will be lots and lots of work involved in getting the building back into habitable shape. There is even a tiny garden attached, which will be just big enough to get me going with planting a jungle of my own. And lots of granite blocks.
So… What is the plan? And why is it crazy? And why am I definitely going to go for it?
Well, I wrote before that my life and mindset got a bit twisted recently. It’s a matter of “Places to go, things to do, and people to meet, NOW!” Plus a handful of “damn the consequences”… And the best way to get something done is simply to do it, right?
Yours charmingly is going to take a long, hard look at her “things to do before it’s too late” list and do as many of them as she can from November 2022 to November 2023. After all, that’s my personal year, from November to November, and the best way to beat the New Years’ Resolution habit.
Owning property in Portugal is almost at the top of that list. Actually, the list leans more towards owning a small farm, but I’ve heard the phrase “future-proofing” on a YouTube clip this week, and since I am getting older, a Quinta may not be a viable option anymore by the time I am done traveling and ready to finally settle down. Even without the obligatory haggling, this house is priced at roughly half of what I would expect to pay for a much smaller place in the town where I live at the moment. There’s even a place to park a broom! (If you follow me on Twitter and have seen my profile pic, you would get that!)
What I fully plan to do in the next few weeks is to apply for my passport (mine expired forever ago, so I need to go through the whole process again!) and then get a NIF number. That’s like a tax ID and ID number, all in one, and you need it for almost everything in Portugal. After that, I shall have to open a Portuguese bank account and deposit at least a month’s salary there. That is three tick marks done on my “D7 Visa” checklist!
The crazy part of this post is that I want to resign, but have nothing to fall back on. Yes, I have almost no debt, and what little I have (the bond) will be gone once my apartment is sold, but there will be a period in which I will have to rely on family and friends for the very basics until my pension fund pays out and the sale of my property is finalized. After that, I shall still have to be extremely frugal, spending money only on the bare necessities <Insert Baloo here!> and legal representation, and finally also on some international transactions involving property in Portugal and a French Army Surplus Truck! (Not expensive to purchase, but hella expensive to outfit the way I want it to be!)
I have no idea whatsoever what would happen after that, other than that I would have to get my C1 driver’s license, and in double time, too! And I shall have to embark on an expensive Do-It-Together project to make the above French Army Surplus Truck (Renault TRM 2000) properly expedition-worthy. I say Do-It-Together because although I am neither a qualified electrician nor plumber, I shall have to learn at least the basic skills involved in maintaining the truck’s systems, so it will have to be me handing spanners and screwdrivers and asking double the number of questions that I normally do. And I shall have my YouTube Ph.D. in Expedition Vehicle Building within three months.
Yes, there are companies in Cape Town who build and maintain Expedition Trucks, mostly for wealthy foreigners who want to come and “Safari in Africa”, so the materials won’t be hard to come by even if they will be costly. So the rig will have to pay for itself from Day One and the first YouTube videos will have to go out almost immediately, too. (Another investment – GoPro Camera vlogging setup!)
But…
I want to make my first real outing with the truck a memorable and meaningful one. I have been thinking long and hard about this, and I have come to the conclusion that I would need a travel companion on the longest journey that I have ever been on, bar none! We’re talking muscles, brains, mechanical skills, field medical training, and maybe even some combat experience. And if he can drive a big 4-wheel-drive stick through bush and mud, that would be a bonus!
It would be a lot like the Wounded Warrior challenges, but I am specifically considering a Ukrainian Army vet. Yes, one of the Knights of St Javelin will do nicely! The goal of this exercise would be to travel from Cape Town down to the Southernmost tip of Africa (Cape Agulhas) and then take the road northwards towards the Northernmost tip (Ras Ben Sakka), braving and documenting all kinds of adventures along the way, until we cross the ferry from Marocco into Spain (too many horror stories about the Tunisia/Italy ferries), suffering through Europe, and then finally ending in Kyiv! I want to use the trip as a way to raise some awareness of and money for different rebuilding and empowerment projects and maybe even physically help on some projects along the way and in Ukraine. That is if they will deem me worthy. (Hence the Knight to bear witness on my behalf!)
But that’s definitely on the cards now. Because I put it there. Life is too short for doing things that eat your soul. Time to go for things that make my pulse race and my mind spark.
(No, that’s not the coffee!)
Watch this space!