Did you ever see The Holiday – that lovely movie with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet who swop their homes?
Well, my husband and I belong to the very site they used for that movie – homeexchange.com. It is the best way to travel – really.
Who can afford to pay for accommodation in euros or pounds these days? And if you want to stay for three weeks then it is really unaffordable. So we joined a few years ago and have had the most incredible holidays – and we’ve made good friends with some of our swoppers.
Our first swop was to London – fancy little pad in Kensington. We have done that swop so many times and we’re now on such good terms with our houseswopper that he moves out when we want his place (our place is big enough for him to share if he is in CT!)
We swopped for a month to an apartment in Amsterdam – and we swopped cars – so we could head off to Bruges in Belgium for a weekend and drive around the Dutch countryside. The apartment was on Java island – a short ferry ride from Amsterdam’s central station and overlooked a very active channel with ships going back and forth. Beautiful!
A month in Paris followed – in a home opposite Gerard Depardieu’s mansion – our apartment not quite in the same league but I spent most days hoping I would bump into the French actor.
Next we swopped to Italy – an apartment on Lake Maggiore with views that took my breath away! The name of the town is Laveno and you hop on and off ferries to other little Italian and Swiss towns all along the lake. Loved it – so much in fact we are going back this September.
Then it was off to New York for a white Christmas – again a beautiful apartment just three blocks from Central Park. And the sales were on – bliss all round.
The other fabulous part of being a member of homeexchange is opening your mailbox and seeing all the wonderful offers that come in – most of the time you can’t take them up but half the fun is seeing where the offers come from. Just today we got an offer from Helsinki and Florence!
What we did expect was a lot of requests for the duration of the World Cup. Nada – as in nothing – oh yes, actually one: the most awful-looking hovel in Brazil, with a hammock as the bed in the main room – I think not.
But otherwise all quiet – although initially there were many people listed for SA World Cup time. Before we knew airticket prices would be so utterly ridiculous we approached a few in Italy but no takers at all. But then again maybe a good thing – our London houseswopper told dreadful stories about a Sir of the soccer world who rented a house – and of course he behaved impeccably but his visitors trashed the place and drank out the cellar!!
From the 7th floor: Our weekly cover barker meetings can really go either way. We get together every Wednesday morning for an hour or two and thrash out ideas for those enticing cover headlines you read each week. Sometimes those few hours are utter agony.
We don’t always have all the copy and often the journalists are still out on interviews when we have to pen those words.
The YOU cover goes to factory early afternoon and often our final stories only get subbed and sent after 10pm!
But this week was great fun. As we were stressing about what would be the main barker fantastic stuff got sent from our London office on Michael Jackson and his dodgy doctor and all the court revelations – a riveting read. Perfect – a lead – at the 11th hour! And the other barkers were great fun to put together – we get very silly sometimes and shout and scream at how brilliant we are. Or we sit in silence for ages trying to come up with something catchy that will sell the story.
So when you read them think about what has gone into them – we have you the reader in mind the whole time. Will you want to read the story?
Will it give you something to talk about, have we barkered something for every reader and every age group?
Is there a good mix of stories on the cover?
It might seem like a quick read for you but there’s a whole involved process behind those short lines.