Not such a great week for me....I had some sad news that a family member has passed away. This is when living out here becomes reality and although you are only 2.5 hours away by plane (3 days by car! 5 days by motorbike!!!!) you are a million miles away when people really need you!

After a stressful couple of days and the knowledge that the rest of the family are pulling together it hits you like a brick wall that this is it...we are here...we are living the dream, no longer are our family or close friends on hand if we need them or they need us! (Our best friend who is expecting a baby was taken ill and had to go into hospital, Steve's son, is taking his A level's) Always a reason not to be here but we always knew the long road was a winding one!!

On a lighter note...No real progress on the house this week, we have been doing quite a bit of cleaning and tonight I am sitting outside in the darkness - as today work has started on our electricity (we are rewiring). The only place we have electricity is inside our little Trullo!

Yesterday a man came to help us with our land - he strimmed our one hectare garden, it took him six hours to do and he charged us 90euro and it looks great! This afternoon we were invited to the previous owners house (Vincenzo and Maria) in a little place only 10km away in San Vito. They speak no English and our Italian is getting better by the day...PENSO!! (I THINK!!). We talked about our land and that we have had an offer from the man who did the strimming that he will look after and collect the olives - then he will give us back some of the oil that the olives make and also the same with the vines, because at the moment we have no time to look after them (and to be honest I wouldn't know where to start!!) Vincenzo didn't agree at all...he then told us that we can get at least 70 litres of oil from our olives...but the best of all at least 400 litres of wine!!!! he then proceeded to get some bottles from his cellar and we were able to sample our wine! Steve has named the wine Vista Blurrr...and believe me - it's not bad!!!!

So tomorrow Vincenzo will come to the house and has promised to teach us how to look after them...but only for this year, then we are on our own! Ohhh well, so the house still looks like something from World War 2 but at least we have Vista Blurrr to look forward to!!

Today we have started our residency process, we now have to wait for a visit from the local police so we can prove we live here and hopefully in four months time we will be legal here!!

Next week we will be back in England so we will write soon.... S&S capturelavista@hotmail.com