As many of you may know, when we moved, we rented our house to a seemingly nice couple. Let’s just say first impressions aren’t always correct. They moved out, hired a lawyer and, after some ugly and depressing months, they left permanently. We’ve been trying to re-rent the place, which isn’t so easy in the wintertime.

We just signed a lease with new tenants and are hoping to be luckier this time. The good news is that we are going to stop bleeding money and we don’t have to worry about our home standing empty. The bad news is that the lease it for one year (although we gave them an option to leave early by giving notice), so we won’t be able to move back into it until March of next year.

This was not part of our plan, in which we envisioned returning to Montclair in time for Thanksgiving 2016. So things didn’t go as we expected, and there are certainly worse things than spending some extra months in London. But we really did want to be back in familiar places with all of our friends. Of course, we could come back and rent a place in Montclair or maybe do a house trade or something. We are hopeful of spending the Holidays in New Jersey this year, one way or the other.

This nice thing is that we are about to enter a period in which we are going to have lots of visitors. We are almost completely booked until the end of June! And we will both be back in mid-April for about a week (although Judie will be going to L.A. and Orlando and NYC for business), so that combination should deal with our feelings of homesickness. It should be fun.

And now, back to the travelogue.