House swap Australia

The trouble with Birthdays when you get a bit older is that you are getting closer and closer to death and disablement with every new one. Not a very positive start but hopefully it should get lighter as we get going. Claire and I don’t normally get each other a birthday or Christmas present for each other, preferring to take a holiday together. For the first time, I bought myself a birthday present on Monday; I subscribed to a website that deals with exchanging homes for a holiday around the world. It wasn’t expensive at about £16 for 3 months registration and I have yet to find out if it rolls over and almost impossible to get out of without deleting your credit card. There are lots of them but the website that I used is http://www.homexchangevacation.com/ . You can choose any destination around the world to swap with. You can register free and view everywhere you like but you can’t contact anyone until you pay for full registration.

It’s quite exciting looking at all the properties that are trying to do the same. You can make the search easier by entering dates and more details to narrow down the results. Once registered I emailed about 20 people that wanted to swap for a property in England. I had 3 come back when I read my emails this morning, 2 saying thanks but no thanks and one that is very interested in swapping between December 2009 and February 2010. They live in Queensland at a place called Townsville right by the coast and the Great Barrier Reef in a 5 bedroom 3 bathroom executive house with its own grounds and massive pool. Wow, they will be disappointed if they swap with us, especially over winter. They also want to swap cars as they have 2 for us to choose from a 2004 Mercedes and a 2006 Subaru Liberty GT wagon (whatever one of those is). I hope they like Claire’s KA.

I have already started to look at flights and it’s looking like at least £600 return so it might be worth getting a “round the world” ticket with 6 or 7 stop over’s for a few hundred pounds more. I’m so excited but Claire says she feels stressed. How can a round the world holiday with 3 months in Australia make you stressed? I couldn’t think of anything more un-stressing. Anyway, we are getting no younger and it makes sense to take some time out to enjoy yourselves while you can sometimes. We all work hard enough, so we can all play hard as well.

We have just had Carters Estate Agents around to value Jim and Shirley’s house. Strangely his estimation was the same as we had already discussed with Jim, and he thinks it should sell quite easily as there are more people looking than selling at the moment. It is perfectly suited to a young family and he thinks that it would appeal to a young family so that’s good. He is coming back this afternoon to take some photos. I said that the owner has agreed to replace the wall between the two bedrooms if the purchaser wanted. Hope that’s ok Jim?