About us.

Hi, and welcome to our website. We are Steve and Carole and we live in Estepona, southern Spain.

We are both British and we came to Spain in October 2003 to sort of semi-retire in the Mediterranean sunshine.

We sold our house in England and bought our villa here in Estepona as a 'restoration project'. It was structurally sound but it had had some fairly serious fire damage, as you can see below.

It was just what we were looking for, a blank canvas. Little did we know!

It took 11 months, a little blood, a lot of sweat and a few tears. But eventually it got finished and we settled down to enjoy our new, relaxed lifestyle.

To see it as it is now, have a look at villalaurel.com - it's for sale!

Then what?

After a little bit of rest and recuperation we soon got bored with sitting in the sun and generally doing nothing. We're not old enough for that yet!

How old are we? Well let's just say that my age starts with a five and Carole's starts with a...(censored!!)

Oops! Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, we started looking and thinking about how we could occupy our time and maybe make a little money as well.

My background was in the motor industry and Carole was an accounts supervisor. Neither of us wanted to go back to what we had been doing in England so those avenues were closed.

So what did we do?

Obviously, living in Spain has allowed us to get out there and discover more about Spain and the Spanish way of life.

We have been fortunate enough to meet some lovely people and sample some pretty outstanding local food.

Neither of us were from a foody background but both of us love to cook and both of us love Spanish food.

In the course of our travels, the seed was sown in our minds about the possibilities of creating a website about our favourite part of Spanish culture: tapas.

What happened next?

There was just one small problem with our grand master plan: neither of us had a clue about website design, or html, or ftp, or any of the other strange abbreviations that fly around the world wide web.

So I was assigned the job of finding out. (Yeah, thanks Carole!)

I looked at hundreds of web pages until my eyes went square and I was fully Googled-out.

I have to admit, the prospect of getting my head around all that almost made me give up on more than one occasion. There's only so much a tired-old brain can take in!

Fortunately I stumbled over an easy way to realise our goal and create our website without any of this geeky computer knowledge.

You are now looking at the result. How cool is that for a couple of semi-retired 'older teenagers'?!

If you're curious about how we did it, have a look at the you can do it too page.

Life in Spain.

So now here we are enjoying the warmth of the Spanish climate, running an online business and doing what we want to do with our time.

I do the daily maintenance of the website, a bit of article writing and some photography. Carole lazes about in the sun! (Only joking - honest!)

Actually, Carole now has her own business making curtains, cushions and soft furnishings which keeps her pretty busy.

And when she's not doing that she likes nothing better than to be up to her elbows in the garden.

It's a nice life. It's not going to turn us into millionaires but, as they say, there's a lot more to life than money, my friend.

Drop us a line and say hello on the contact us page. We'll be happy to answer any queries you may have.

We hope you enjoy our site.

 

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Carole insisted that I put this picture in here because she says it sums me up quite nicely. Don't know what she means!

You too? Would you like to know how this website came about and how we created it? I would like to share with you the secret to its success.