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We left Dreaming On at Kim Hackett's dock in Pompano Beach just north of Fort Lauderdale and travelled to UK from Miami on 9th August. David and Carolann were kind enough to take us to Miami Airport.

First stop in UK was to drive to Tollesbury in Essex to meet up with Adam and his boat Hero. Geoff was familiar with Hero having spent a week on board in April 2009 helping Adam on his maiden voyage from Keyhaven just west of Lymington in Hampshire, back to Tollesbury Marina.

Simon and family

Ben the mischievous one.

Drove from Nottingham to Horsham, just south of London Gatwick Airport to visit Geoff's oldest son Simon, (hence the title Simon the Elder) and his family, Debs, Lucy, Daniel and Ben. Lucy and Daniel (twins) are unbelievably almost 11. Where does the time go? Ben is now 8.

Lucy and Daniel (Simon's children), visit at weekends and Ben, (Deb's son), is resident, so It is so nice to see them all so comfortable together.

As always on our visits, Debs excelled with her usual superb gourmet cooking. Geoff was in heaven!

We had a great time with the family, visited a couple of great parks in the Horsham area and generally had a fun time with the kids. Learned how to play with Wii games! New experience for us oldies!

Lucy. Glamorous at 11

Daniel, the scientist?

Simon (the younger) has been working in New York for a year on secondment from Barclays Capital. For that year he has been living in provided accommodation. But having taken on a new 2 year assignment, he has had to find and rent his own apartment.

As a break from our ongoing bathroom rebuild, Iza wanted to fins somewhere to go hiking. We've owned property on Nottingham for almost 10 years, but have only ever been there to work on properties. We've never taken the time to explore. Only when we opened the UK atlas did we realise how close the Derbyshire Peak District is to Nottingham. Geoff used to go there as a child when he and family lived in Yorkshire, but that was a little while ago!

So on 6th September, we took a day of and drove through the southern Peak District to Castleford where we picked up the guide to local walks and then hiked for a few hours over the moors.

Geoff's younger son Nick, who is now 38 lives in Scotland with his fantastic wife Yvonne and lovely children Amy 8, and Holly 4.

We decided again this year to meet up with them halfway to give them a trip away from home and us another DIY break. So on Nick's advice we agreed to meet and camp in the area around Settle in the Yorkshire Moors. A great choice.

Our memories of camping in UK have usually been overcrowded, wet and cold, but we agreed to give it a go and it made sense with the children plus Mac and Bonnie their dogs.

Beautiful scenery, beautiful weather and lots of fun.

One of the attractions of the area is a scenic train ride through the moors.

We camped at a small village pub by a river and were the only campers with the field to ourselves, so it worked out very well. It was cold and very damp at night, especially for those middle of the night plumbing calls, but we slept well and thoroughly enjoyed our trip and their company.

On 22nd September, we flew from East Midlands Airport, very close to Nottingham, to Barcelona. Geoff's oldest son, Simon (the Elder!) works for easyJet and was able to fix staff tickets for us.

Geoff had been to Barcelona on business a few times many years ago, but neither of us had spent time there to really see the place.

We loved it. Although the Gaudi buildings are one obvious attraction, the whole city seems devoid of ugly buildings and every road seems to have preserved the old buildings well.

We walked and walked for miles plus a few trips on the excellent metro to see more distant attractions.

Luckily one of Barcelona's main HOLIDAYS was held while we were there so there was activity everywhere late into the night.

On 24th September, we rented a car from Barcelona to drive south through Alicante to our apartment in Torrvieja.

On the way south, we stopped in at Denia, just north of Alicante to see if we could find our old friends from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, David and Karen. We had lost touch but had heard that they had bought a restaurant. We found it, and them. Had a great meal and catch up and stayed overnight.

Our apartment in Torrevieja is usually rented out but we were able to take a free week and as we hadn't visited for a few years, our visit was definitely overdue. It's a one bedroom attic apartment in a beautiful old development that Iza fell in love with when she first saw it 10 years ago. We've only managed to visit a couple of times since we bought it.

Geoff's sister Carol and husband Bob had visited a couple of years earlier and given the place a quick internal paint and done some essential repairs, but it is a fairly simple structure so does not require much maintenance.

Iza was down with some flu type bug while we were there which limited our activities, but we still managed to enjoy the trip.

We also had torrential rain for two days and the road outside seems to be the rain capture road for the entire area so was completely flooded, leaving all sorts of flotsam and builders rubble in its wake.

On 29th September, we flew back on easyJet from Alicante to London Gatwick Airport.

We flew back from London to Miami and back to Dreaming ON, on 19th October. Then on 5th November we flew from Fort Lauderdale to JFK on JetBlue to visit Simon in his new New York pad in Tribeca, Manhattan.

We all hear that New York apartments are difficult to find and expensive. Bearing that in mind he has done very well in only one day's viewing. There's a lot of floor space with very high ceilings with the bedroom on a gallery floor. The only shortcoming is that the height of the gallery is only around 4' 6", so he can only date very short girlfriends!

Persuaded him to give us a budget for some necessary additions including a washing machine and then went shopping at his expense. Nice feeling.

We love Manhattan and as in our previous visit to him in 2007, did a lot of walking.

On the Sunday we visited the famous Brooklyn market, which included a walk from Tribeca on the west side of Manhattan Island across to Brooklyn Bridge on the east side. The market is held close to the east end of the bridge across the river in Brooklyn.