Housesitting. In Italy. Magnifico!
Regular followers of this blog and our podcast will know we are no strangers to housesitting.
We spent three months housesitting around Europe when we travelled the world with the kids for a year.
From there, we were hooked, and in the last five years (both as a family and as a couple), we have clocked up twenty-seven housesits worldwide.
It’s official.
We are now professional housesitters.
This week’s show is brought to you from Tuscany in Italy. Brian and Liz’s home for the next six weeks while they housesit a superb home with a friendly little cat.
I know. You don’t have to tell us. We feel like we’ve won the lottery.
The thing with Italy is everyone thinks it is perfect.
And it is. Of course, it is. I mean, what’s not to love about Italia?
The buildings are beautiful, the weather is lovely, the people are gorgeous, and the food is divine…
But what about those bloody pigeons? (Why have the flying rats chosen THAT house?) And all those steps?
And WHY, just because the Italian restaurant owners are so strong and handsome and persuasive, do you end up with an 80 euro bill when all you went in for was a bowl of olives??
Sit back and let Liz and Brian share a few things about Italy that might just surprise you…
A trait of being English is that one is very patriotic. One does not slag off one’s country. Absolutely not. That’s very un-English.
So it was hard making this post. Because we had to say how we felt about returning to England, and not all of it was pretty…
In this week’s travel podcast, we discuss exactly how it felt to return home to England.
The things we (really) miss and the things that, for one reason and another, got right up our nose.
It was all going so well. We had just driven from England to Greece in our little red car, had the time of our lives in Greece and were now ready to turn around and have more adventures in Europe.
And then it happened. The car broke down. Blew up. Bang. Kaput. Two miles outside of Calais.
Of course, we were devastated. Gutted. Panicked.
How would we continue our trip? How would we get back to Italy in time for our six-week housesit that we had committed to in Tuscany?
And more importantly…HOW MUCH would the repairs on our little red love bug investment cost us??
To an outsider, it all looks so idyllic.
A husband and wife swanning off to a Greek island to be with their darling kid cherubs.
But what’s it really like in Greece? What is happening behind closed doors in Greece? Behind the half-open crack?
In this week’s podcast, Liz and Brian discuss cats, criminals and being left to starve because they weren’t quite Greek enough…
If this doesn’t make you laugh and want to visit Greece, I don’t know what will.
Last week, a member of our private community who lives in the US, attended an interview for a job in New Zealand (exciting!)
One of the questions that were in the interview preparation pack was:
“How might you describe the kiwi culture?”
In this week’s show, Brian and I pass on the comments from other members in our NZ Ahead community and share with you what those who have been living in New Zealand for a while have observed about the Kiwi culture.
I’m Liz, and this is my family.
I do Travel. I do Wine. I do being a mum to big kids. Sometimes I do all three at the same time.
I don’t do hormones. Or looking perfect for Instagram. Or dieting.
Read more about who I am and why we should be friends on our about us page.