Recently we've been spending time a bit of time, trying choosing where to stay when we visit Berlin and Ljubljana in September.

Over recent years we have been amazingly lucky with our choices the highlights being our apartment in Chelsea, New york, which was so "New York" it hurt. When we went to Paris in 2003, we had a brilliant stay in the midst of one of those amazing Parisian apartment buildings, where you could almost feel the presence of Jean-Paul Sartre in the air. Then we we went to wonderful Vilnius and stayed in a show home for new rich of the Baltics. Last year it was Berlin and that lovely house and garden.

We picked out a few places which look really nice for this years trip. Part of the fun in doing this is the element of the unknown. The places we stay in, are not part of some huge global hotel chain, where everything looks the same, not matter where you are. Sometimes it can be tricky working out how things work, but that is part of the fun. Hotels just don't have that element of fun about them.