From Research to Ready: Prepping for Our Next Spain Trip It was time to get our next trip to Spain on the books, so we made our reservations to visit the last part of September for a week. This time we’re going to fly into the Valencia airport. It is an hour away from Javea, about the same distance as the Alicante airport. We’ll be using both once we live there, so want to do our best to start getting familiar with the airports and the routes in and out of them. Based upon all the things we learned in February, we now have a great idea of what we want and where to look. Our goal is to hopefully…

This trip ended up being insightful for us and helped narrow down the neighborhoods and types of houses we would really be interested in. It was also great to see the area in a completely opposite season. When we were there in August, it was warm, sunny and crowded with tourists. This time, it was really nice with temps in the 60s during the day and 50s at night. It was also good to see the area in its "everyday" state. Regular traffic, minimal tourists, etc.

After our successful August trip, we were ready to plan the next one.

We'd learned our lesson about checking the Spanish holiday calendar first — that ruled out November, December and the first half of January. We landed on the first week of February instead: no Spanish holidays in the way and it happened to line up with a work trip one of us already had to North Africa. Reservations made.

Everything on our trip went to plan. We flew into Barcelona, had dinner at our favorite restaurant, Cañete, and left the next morning for Valencia. We split the four hour drive to Valencia between the main high-speed highway and the smaller, slower coastal one. We wanted to get a closer look at all of the little towns that dot the coast. August is prime vacation time in Europe, so traffic along the coastal highway was extremely busy, especially in the small coastal towns.

We arrived in Valencia, checked into our hotel and went to have lunch with our friends. After a typical paella lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening getting a personal tour of Valencia. It's a city we can easily see visiting often given its close proximity (1 hr) from Jávea and Dénia.

in early summer, we booked our flights for mid-August. We'd fly into Barcelona, stop and see our friends in Valencia and then drive on to the Jávea/Dénia area to check out the heart of the Costa Blanca. It would give us the opportunity to drive down the coast for 3-4 hours, check out Valencia and then continue south to Alicante, where we'd take the high speed train back to Madrid and fly home. It would give us a chance to check out the roads, the drive times and accessibility to key cities in Spain.

While we love Alicante, we knew that the city itself was a bit bigger than what we wanted for a place to live. We wanted to be close enough though, so we could visit. That's how we ended up finding Jávea and Dénia. They're equidistant between Valencia and Alicante (an hour either way, plus airport access at both), and they're set right on the coast itself. That meant we had a good chance of fulfilling one of our goals: a house with a sea view, close to the beaches.

Right after the New Year, we decided to put all of our effort into seeing how we could make our overseas move to Spain work.

We met with our financial planners to determine if we could actually do this and quit work. We've always been good and diligent about setting money aside over the years and investing it wisely. The good news was, yes, we could. That was one key point because it's a lot easier to emigrate to Spain, if you're not planning on working. It eliminates a lot of red tape.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, the question shifted from "where" to "whether" — could the Costa Blanca actually deliver what we needed to make this work long term? We had a long list of boxes to check, but the more research we did, the more confident we became that this could work.

We made our first visit to Alicante to check out Galgos del Sol, a galgo rescue we wanted to support. It was about 90 minutes south, but as we drove through the city and down the coast, we knew this was an area that we could see ourselves living. Our goal over the years was to eventually move out of the US and either to the EU or maybe even SE Asia.