A new adventure began in 2016 when we bought the proverbial "place in the sun." We are now enjoying frequent good times in Vejer de la Frontera a picturesque, typical white village in Andalusia. It is close to the unspoilt beaches of the Costa de la Luz and is a convenient base for exploring Vejer as well as near-by Cadiz and Jerez. The area has great walking and surfing opportunites, including a world-famous kite-surfing base down the coast at Tarifa. The hou...

We've been home nearly a week now and the jet-lag is just about beaten: getting up is probably just normal hard now, not especially jet-lag hard! It is lovely to be home and to begin to see people and to catch up with all that has been happening whilst we've been away. It is also time to reflect on the experience of house-swapping and that's what Jill wants to write about here - you'll note that she is stepping away from our usual blog-authoring convention of not...

All good things have to come to an end! Today was the day that we left New York to travel home at the end of our twelve weeks away. You'll not be surprised to hear that a good part of the morning was taken up with packing. This was quite a challenge as we had each been travelling with an extra bag, the contents of which had to be packed into the airline permitted number of bags. Eventually we had the success of everything packed - we couldn't check if the bags we...

We started the day catching up on some blog writing. You might think that a waste of our precious New York time but we knew that we had a long and packed day planned, with a rendezvous with the Empire State Building about 5:30pm, and that devoting an hour or two (it always takes longer than we expect) to the blog was a good way to pace the day. Our day's excursions started with the subway to Grand Central Station to view its architecture and to have lunch. As eve...

On Friday we decided to explore slightly further afield than Manhattan so after breakfast we took the subway to Brooklyn Bridge, not far from the apartment but we wanted to save our legs for the walking we had planned in Brooklyn. Dave ended up carrying a rucksack as rain was forecast and we needed our brolly, waterproofs etc. It wasn't raining as we began our walk over the bridge to Brooklyn and although the sky was overcast the bridge afforded new views of lowe...