A bit more about us, the people behind Costa Blanca Kids
We are Rachel & John (both 43), busy parents of 4 young children: Savannah (9), Aurora (7), Easton (5) & Tiago (3). Having travelled extensively all over the world prior to having kids, we were keen to carry this on with our little ones. So, after living and working for many years in Nottingham in the UK, back in 2019 we made the bold (some might say foolish!) decision to leave our jobs and home behind and set off for a year of travel with our 3 kids (at the time) in our vintage motorhome, a classic Hymer from 1991 lovingly referred to by us as ‘Hazel’.
Our adventures took us from the UK to all corners of Western Europe, then over to Morocco for an amazing month of touring. Every day brought new excitement and we honestly never looked back. Hoping to document and share some of our experiences with other family travellers, we started a travel blog called ‘Children of Wanderlust‘.
Unfortunately, in March 2020, our year of travel was suddenly cut short as our lives, along with the rest of the world, were turned upside down by the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. We were actually much luckier than many others in our position as we were staying at a family member’s house in the Costa Blanca region of Spain at the time. This gave us the option of staying in one place, rather than having to try and battle our way back home to the UK across closed borders and with minimal facilities available to us. This was particularly useful as Rachel was pregnant at the time with our 4th child.
Fast forward 4 months and our new baby, Tiago, was born in Torrevieja hospital. Giving birth in Spain during a pandemic was certainly different to the first 3 births back in the UK! If you want to know more about what it was like, you can read about it here.
Having stayed through the pandemic, we grew to enjoy our new life in Spain. We have been coming to the sunny Costa Blanca for over 20 years on holiday, so already knew the area well. So, we successfully applied for Spanish residency, put our kids into our local Spanish school and made the decision to stick around. After all, there are much worse places to live!
3 years later and we’re still here. We’ve had a few setbacks and frustrations along the way but have managed to now forge a new start for us and integrate into local life. Our kids are learning Spanish at school and getting better at it by the day. If nothing else, we figure that if we can give them the gift of another language then we can always look back on this period of our lives as having been worthwhile.
One thing that we have found from living in Spain is that while there are an abundance of local fiestas and events, many of which are suitable for children and often provided for free, they are not always very well advertised. We began to feel frustrated with missing out on things all the time. This is what inspired us to start the Costa Blanca Kids Facebook group, so that other local families like us could share upcoming events and information.
The success of the Facebook group demonstrated that there was definitely a void of local information relating specifically to kids and family activities. Seeing this led to us expanding on the idea and creating this website. We hope that users can find it a useful resource of information for all things to do with kids in Costa Blanca, for both local families and holidaymakers alike.
What will the future bring? For us, who can say. For now we are settled living on the Costa Blanca. Our kids are happy and that is of course what is most important.
That said, we’ve not lost the travel bug completely. Our motorhome sits patiently in our drive, waiting to take us off on a whole new set of adventures one day. We just need to find the right time…
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