Finally received an email from Salvatore confirming he received my deposit for the apartment rental in Rome.

I guess I should give you some background info here. Well, for starters, I’m headed to Europe with the boys, Nick and Alex, and my friend Joy along with her family. There are 8 of us all together.

We’re headed to Paris first, because it’s my favorite place in the world and I wanted to show the boys the city where I will one day live. From there, we are going to Italy. This was Gordy’s choice (Joy’s husband).

As you can imagine, hotel rooms in Paris are quite small so we would probably need about 4 rooms to accommodate our troop. For 4 nights, this would exceed our budget…whatever that was. Anyway, we had the brilliant idea to do a home exchange…Joy and Gordy’s rental house for an apartment in Paris. The problem is, these too are quite small…unless we found something in the outer arrondissements.

Of course, being the lover of Paris that I am, I did not, and I stress…DID NOT want to stay in the outer arrondissements. I wanted to be in the heart of it all. Lucky for us, we didn’t find an exchange.

Did I just say, “Lucky for us”? Would I be willing to forgo a free place to stay in exchange for convenience? I can honestly say, “yes”. At least at the beginning of our planning…Paris is the first stop on our 1 month tour. In hindsight, after all the money being paid out for rentals and flights and the Euro that is slowly, but steadily creeping up…I would now, most certainly, take the exchange.

Anyway, it wasn’t an option…we seriously did not have any luck in the exchange market. I have several theories on this. First of all, the French, along with most Europeans, vacation primarily in July and August…not in June when we are going. The second reason is that not too many people want to travel to hot and humid South Florida in the summer. Finally, many people who post their home for an exchange only do so to draw you in and then offer their place as a rental.

Not to say this is the case with these exchange websites. I have a friend who had a great exchange experience last summer through www.homeexchange.com and we were offered an exchange in Barcelona, but I’ll leave that story for another time.

Alas, we were fortunate enough to find 2 rental studio apartments in the same building located right in the 1st arrondissement.

This brings me back to Salvatore. Salvatore is in Rome and has several vacation rentals. I don’t quite remember how I found his website, whether I found it through www.vrbo.com or if I just stumbled upon it during a random Google search. So, after several email correspondences, I decided on renting one of Salvatore’s apartments. It was the perfect apartment for us…it could accommodate all 8 of us and better yet, the price was right. Who knew Rome was more expensive than Paris??

So, I sent my deposit to Salvatore through PayPal and emailed him the receipt, asking him to respond and let me know that he received my payment. All of a sudden, Salvatore, who was always so prompt in responding with long, drawn out emails, didn’t respond…not to the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd email.

Finally, after the 4th or 5th email to both his personal and website emails, Salvatore comes out of the woodwork.

Phew, all is good…I hope. We’ll see once we get to Rome.

Au revoir!