Thank you for the useful information. Much appreciated.
Hope it goes well for you Tim. We are looking to move back as soon as we have sold but we are just over 80 so do not have as much time as you to get sorted.
Our sale has fallen through so now have to start again just as the financial scene takes a turn for the worse.
Best of luck and enjoy your new lifestyle.
You must feel gutted… I do hope things take a turn for the better, soon.
Where abouts in UK are you planning on moving back to… ?
Yes Stella, it was a bit of a blow but that is what happens sometimes and there is very little you can do about it except pick yourself up and start again.
We are looking to move back to Gloucestershire where most of our family live.
Oh, that will be lovely for you…
fingers crossed… you’ll get another buyer asap.
So you will be constantly socialising with a different circle of people but in a city.
Cities are my idea of hell.
You’ll need it. Strikes all over, the NHS going down the drain.
When you get older you need health care more than before and although it is not perfect here, it is a darned sight better than in UK.
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Have you won the lottery?
The price of the house we sold in Stroud has rocketed.
Yes but Stroud is particularly expensive…
Ha ha… I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone if we’d won the lottery… 
Sometimes life throws things at us which can turn our world upside down…
and… I’m sure anyone who makes the (sometimes difficult) decision to return to UK… has thought things through carefully…
I wish them all the very best.
Could you afford to go back now Jane and live in the same town?
Stroud is not as expensive as Cheltenham or Cirencester.
The northern Cotswolds , Chipping Camden, etc is prohibitively expensive.
You have to live in the Severn Vale or the Forest of Dean, although the Forest has seen prices rise since they abolished the tolls on the Severn Bridge.
It is now much more worthwhile to buy there and commute to Bristol.
Friends of mine lived in Wotton under Edge because of commuting to Bristol and Cheltenham and it is conveniently in the middle.
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A lovely little town.
So has the one we sold in Cheltenham but we will still aim to return there as soon as we can.
No lottery win to help us out unfortuantely, just hard work savings and hopefully a fair price for our house here.
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Thanks Stella, we hope so too but waiting for that sale won’t be hard as it is so peaceful here and we do love it but the house is too big, the difficult garden being on a slope is too big and we are getting older and less able to cope. We also miss our family in the UK and some nieces and nephews and great nieces and nephews, we have not even met yet. It’s going to be one big party when we do make the move
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Best of luck to you Elizabeth, but if it was me I would be saying to myself ‘beware what you wish for’.
I had a recent trip back to home patch in Nottingham and independently met many family members, but there was no big party for the simple reason that so many of them in the same town, not much bigger than a village, simply refuse to talk to one another. I did my best, being the only one acceptable to all, but impossible to change anything. So sad.
We sometimes feel isolated here, because we are, but only from family, not from neighbours, but our situation isn’t unique. Chatting with our lovely aide-soignante this morning as we tended to Fran, she mentioned that she hadn’t exchanged a single word with her own parents, 20 kms away, in 10 years.
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That’s very sad for you David but fortunately, my family is very close, (not too close though) and we all have a very good relationship with each other. No arguments or fall outs in adult life for any of us.
We do have reservations but no grand illusions of what our new life will be. The community we hope to return is very friendly and we already belong to the local history society of the village so keep in touch with what is happening and with people we know and even ex pupils in my husbands case of the school he attended 65 years ago at least.
Very mixed feelings but inability to climb ladders to do the maintenance, to manage the garden so it is tidy etc is becoming much harder to do, so we are leaving while we still are able to enjoy a few years before we really are put out to grass.
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Well best of luck to you, my trip was not all gloom, I went for a school reunion and the dozen of us that could make it, all of us 80, had a great lunch and meal again in the evening. No fallings out there. 
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So there is an upside to it all then. 
It makes you all the more happier when you arrive back where you want to be. You visit was something to look back on when you are enjoying your present environment and appreciating the difference.
After a visit to the UK, I was always so glad to be back home, to the space and the peace and calm. We will miss it dreadfully but we are being sensible about moving and doing it in our time when we can make choices rather than have someone else making them for us.
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