The Gibbons Family

Greetings and salutations!

We’re an everyday family, usually based in Scotland, but we’re keen on travelling, so this blog is a record of our adventures – at home and away.

Running an internet company makes it easy for us to work from anywhere across the globe, and we also home educate our son – so we are truly mobile.

The blog started in the spring of 2008 when we decided we were going on a grand adventure -a 12 week trip with 2 weeks in Catalonia and the rest in France.

We didn’t stay in hotels, or camp-sites though. Instead, we swapped houses. That is, we stayed in someone’s home and in exchange they stayed in ours. For most folks it’s a way to take their annual vacation at less expense and with the usual home comforts. For us, it was a way to travel around a bit and work as usual, but with the luxury of some sunshine, in some beautiful locations.

As it turns out, everyone we meet along the way enriches our lives in some way, and home-swappers are a particularly cool bunch of folks: open-minded individuals with such positive views of the world. As a travel experience, home-swapping is best we’ve had yet. We’re able to experience the towns and villages not from the viewpoint of tourists, but as ‘real’ people, living ‘real’ lives, understanding more of the world along the way.

If you can’t contemplate sharing your private space with ’strangers’ then perhaps home swapping isn’t for you – but we would urge you to consider it. There are plenty of home exchange sites on the web – just type in home/house swap/exchange and take it from there.

We don’t think of ourselves as terribly pioneering, but some of our activities like home ed and house-swapping might be seen as being ‘quite interesting’. I guess we could be seen as being a new generation of entrepreneurs – running a successful business whilst being geographically mobile. Take a look around the site and let us know what you think. And remember to leave a comment – we do love to hear from you.

A quick bio seems only polite at this stage:

Julie

The Boss

I guess most of my time is taken up as marketer in residence at www.peoplemaps.com. We build psychometric/personality applications. PeopleMaps is a family business and we probably spend more time running it than any other single activity, but it’s not all hard graft.

I love being able to travel and still run the business, but more importantly, I love that it affords me the opportunity to home educate WiiR. Spending time with WiiR and Martin is my very favourite thing to do; we’re a good team, especially when we travel. I can’t give enough thanks for having two such inspirational and wonderful individuals in my life.

My dinner wish list would include Joni Mitchell, Gandhi, Isabel Losada and Deepak Chopra – I’m really an old hippy. Join in the fun at Facebook and Twitter or you can email me

Martin

The Driver

Spent years engineering a business that could be run from anywhere and this Grand Adventure is the manifestation of this.

Feeling like I am in the middle of realising a goal and its a great feeling. I’m a bit obsessed about work so it’s great that I can take it about with me. I hate being a tourist. Living in Spain has made me appreciate how good my French is, as my Spanish / Catalan is non existent. Looking forward to practising my French and shopping at markets.

Ruaridh

The Dude

Read my blog

I strive towards utter coolness and to be the ultimate gamer.

I spend my time as a football manager and a Forglar swamp protector (in games) and read and occasionally draw.

My dinner list would be:

Bruce Dickinson; Paulo Nutini; Nicholas Cage; Anthony Horowitz and Erin Hunter.