The Eagle Eventually Lands!

I had intended to start this blog much sooner than April 2024 but so much has happened between May 2023 and now that I simply didn't get around to it. Why write a blog in the first place? Well, I've never written one before. And this is what you should do when you've embarked upon an adventure, surely!

As I've never written a blog before any readers will hopefully excuse any rookie mistakes. For one thing, I recognise I will need to exercise some caution and not share too much in the way of details and addresses etc. The internet can be a crazy enough place.

So I suppose starting at May 2023 is as good a place as any, and May was when we first laid eyes on the place we are now thrilled to call home up here in the far North East of Scotland; not too far from Banff, which sits on the coast, and about an hour North of Aberdeen by car.

Since the COVID-19 lockdowns I think we'd been hankering for somewhere where we could have a little bit more land. Coming from North Wales (beautiful by any standards) it might have seemed a strange choice of relocation but the truth was that we fancied a proper adventure, and what better place than up in Scotland. Our home in Wales was on an estate of houses with postage-stamp size gardens and very little potential to do much more.

With ambitions to keep chickens, ducks, alpacas and ideally a horse (or several) then a new-build property wasn't really an option for us in the long-term. Living so close to the Eryri national park and with Anglesey on our doorstep meant that the majority of nice properties with land in the surrounding area were still pretty expensive. So we gradually expanded our search until I was avidly perusing various property websites each evening and dreaming of potential properties further north.

We organised a trip in early May of 2023 to view a lovely property with stables and a manège up in Aberdeenshire and set off by car on a Thursday to view, only to be called by the estate agent when we were about 1 hour into the journey to inform us the house had been sold and all further viewings halted! Nevertheless, we'd booked a hotel in Aberdeen for the night so we carried on the journey regardless: my husband driving while I scoured RightMove for other properties to go and view.

I managed to schedule 5 viewings in that 12 hour journey, one in Cumbria - which added another 4 hours to what should have been a 8 hour trip - and the others scattered across Aberdeenshire. Organising suitable viewing windows which afforded sufficient travel time between properties was a feat in itself, but by nightfall we had a somewhat ambitious schedule in place for the next day.

We viewed a property on the Friday morning and then drove up to the furthest property on the list, arriving late morning. As soon as we saw it we knew it was the one. The image below shows the view from the top field.

Having decided this was it, I cancelled all other viewings and we drove back to North Wales, my husband once again behind the wheel (it should have been my turn to drive) while I engaged a Scottish solicitor over the phone so we might make an offer on the house the following Monday.

I'm not going to say any of the next part went smoothly - far from it - but eventually the offer was accepted by the sellers and after a frustratingly protracted conveyancing process (not the fault of the Scottish solicitors or indeed the sellers, who were champing at the bit to continue their own journey) we arrived at the new place at the end of November.

We'd originally hoped to move at the end of the summer, but as it was we arrived in just about the worst weather we could have imagined. More on this in subsequent blogs I'm sure.

But to conclude: the eagle did land. A bit later than hoped for, and with much ruffled feathers. But we did it. And not a day has gone by when my husband and I haven't said "look, we did it, we're here!".