We just wanted a week away...

It started back in 2007. We'd just had some major redevelopment work done on our house in the UK, and fortunately, had managed to sell it just before the credit crunch started, and property prices dropped.  One of those all too rare times,  when we were in the right place at the right time, but only knew that afterwards.

Because we'd had the development work done, we hadn't managed to get away for what was becoming our 'regular' holiday some time between January and March that year.  It was early autumn, we had a stash of money burning a hole in our pockets, but more importantly, we wanted a cheap holiday.  We were looking for a suitable plot of land in the UK, on which to build something gorgeous - and as anyone who has done this will tell you, finding that is like finding a hen's tooth, or a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

We decided a week in Greece sounded like a nice option for a cheap holiday, and booked it.  I intended to read for a week, my husband intended to get brown.  We had no intention of doing anything other than relaxing for a week.  In fact, the closest to Greece we'd ever been before was to Cyprus, so we expected it would be just the same as that.  The plane rounded the island before landing, and our earliest impression was that it was surprisingly mountainous - see how little homework we'd done?  (For those of you new to Greece, it is mountainous!). 

For the first couple of days, we lounged around our holiday villa.  We appreciated the intense blue sky, the food, the quaint little village we were in, but in truth, we'd accidentally let the battery on the hire car get flat, and couldn't be that bothered about getting it sorted, so didn't go anywhere.  Then my husband got cabin fever, so we emerged and went into the island's main town for a wander.  Still fixated on property, we browsed estate agent's windows, out of habit rather than out of any real intent to act. We saw something that interested us, and went in to enquire further.  One thing led to another, and the following day, we were back there, apropos an island tour of plots of land.  And Then We Saw It.  A small plot, atop a local mountain, quiet, a short walk into a little village that looked as if time had forgotten about it, with views to the larger mountains in the west, a view over one of the many bays to the north, and quiet shrubland to the south.  Views of other Greek islands to the east.  The air was vibrant with the smell of herbs, and quivered with the hum of insects in the heat.  We enquired the price, and were astounded at how cheap it was (compared to UK land prices) - I will be blogging more about this in future posts.  The next thing to do was discover how we could go about buying it, given that we were only there a week, knew nobody, and didn't speak Greek.  If only we had realised then what we were setting ourselves up for!

Next time, I will explain more about what we learnt in the early days of this project - how to go about buying land in Greece, including advice on how to avoid some of the mistakes we made.