A personal account of our experience

When Pam and I we were ready to retire from teaching we attended a course at Chester. The course director was excellent. She provided a very friendly and relaxed atmosphere for the day and the lunch was very good. There was lots of useful information provided to help teachers in retirement.

One thing that stuck in my mind from that day was the idea that you needed to treat retirement as the third phase of your life. The first phase being childhood (school and college), the second adulthood (the working years). Now you were entering that third phase you needed to make it different to the first two. The Course Director suggested that it was important to set new challenges, maybe take up new hobbies.

We knew for sure that the last thing we wanted to do was to retire and continue living where we were. In all probability we would have ended up going back to teach part time or on supply just to fill the days in. We also knew that the pension we would receive would not sustain the lifestyle that we wanted.

We had always said that we would move abroad when we retired but had always thought that France would be our first choice. Spain is much easier to get to and in any case we had enjoyed quite a few holidays there. So Spain it was. What better challenge than starting your new life in a different country.

Keith and Pamela Williamson, Villas Andrea, BIGASTRO