Make yourself at home... anywhere

MY friends recommended home-exchanging. They’d been swapping houses with people all over the world, three to five times a year.

Their summer holiday was a home exchange; as were mid-term, Christmas and Easter. They developed friendships with people in other cities and would head to, say, an apartment in uptown Manhattan for a weekend. Out for dinner one night, they recommended it to us.

I went on the home-exchange website. Some of the properties were beautiful, others not, but there was a huge variety from all over the world.