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Anyway!

I’m sitting on our decking writing this on my laptop.

The sun is blaring down and life feels good.

I normally feel terrible when my time with Sonny and Lola is coming to an end (tomorrow they go back to their mams after 2 weeks with me) but don’t this time for some reason.

I take that as a good sign.

We’ve had a lovely little staycation holiday.

I wrote our last summary update just before we left the first leg of our holiday on our last morning in Keswick in the Lake District, north east England, just down from The Borders.

We then drove to South Shields, north east England and spent a week there.

It was obviously a holiday but since it was the first time I had been able to get down there from Aberdeen, where I live, since we were down for New Year I ended up going to all of our self catering places there.

I ask our guests to raise any issues with me and our great cleaners also spot anything that doesn’t look right so it is able to be rectified.

But there is no substitute for looking with your own eyes to spot any issues to correct or improvements you could make.

And we ended up doing a fair bit of decluttering, gardening and tidying some of my possessions which were in storage and bringing a lot of stuff back up with us in our old campervan.

Oh and I also did 2 runs to the tip or the recycling village as it is now called! How posh! Haha.

Our amazing multipurpose vehicle which has been more a removal van than a place to sleep in since we got it!

I also ended up doing a fair few (dozens I think!) live videos on our South Shields Facebook page.

Partly to show people our amazing places (I will also upload the walkthroughs I took to our website) and partly to show off our amazing coast line, beaches, the Sanddancer beach bar/restaurant where we had some nice food. We even did a video whilst driving around our places and showed some of the great coastline.

Last Saturday we walked for miles and miles along the coast, the beaches, and the clifftops. The sky was looking fantastic, and similar to our Aberdeen family walk at the start of June, I took some stunning photos and have started to issue them about daily on our South Shields facebook and Instagram pages.

One of the photos from our South Shields coastal walk.

We have received loads of great feedback on them so please feel free to follow us on those platforms if you would like to see and hear more.

I think when I got to South Shields our facebook page for there had about 500 likes and its now almost up to 700 so it feels like we are doing something right and people are enjoying the work we put in to showcase the town and our places!

We also went kayaking! The sea was pretty calm (for the North Sea!) and we also got some amazing shots of the sea and coastline and cliffs from the kayak so will start sharing them as well if there’s an appetite for them!

I also saw dolphins on Saturday morning along Sandhaven beach!! They were flipping all over, like you see they do in those parks in Florida!

In other breaking news Sonny and myself got our first post lockdown haircut when we were down there in my friends new barber shop Todds Chop Shop and it feels great not to be walking round with a big mop top blowing all around into your eyes haha!

On the blog front, I wrote a thanks to all key workers.

And about our very different summer holiday.

Then just yesterday I wrote about a guy I used to know called Joe who was a bricklayer.

Finally, a lovely family who are using our Aberdeen 4 bed place for the transition back to the UK from the States checked in last night and are happily settled in and our contractors in our 4 bed townhouse in both Shields are delighted that they have found a great home from home to use as the base while they are working in the area for 5-6 months.

That place still has weekend availability, and all of our other other Aberdeen & South Shields 2 & 3 bed places are fully available for bookings.

Despite the lockdown restrictions being lifted and me pushing really hard on social media the bookings still haven’t stared to flood in.

But I am confident that I am doing all of the right things so they will come.

So as always if you need or anyone else needs as good a place as you can get post lockdown (self check in, own living, cooking and dining spaces, etc) for work, rest of play in the Aberdeen and South Shields areas please get in touch.

And again, every single click onto out posts, likes, comments and shares are really appreciated. Facebook, etc then put the posts higher up peoples newsfeeds and we get more exposure.

Every little helps!

Thanks for reading and have a great Sunday.

Cheers.

Colin.