Our home has three levels. On the main level are a living room, dining area, and very well-equipped kitchen with a large collection of cookbooks. The upper level has two bedrooms, each with a queen-sized bed, a home office/library, and a bathroom. The lower level has a third bedroom (with twin beds), a large family room, a bathroom, and a laundry room. A door on the lower level leads to a patio and the backyard.

We have a front porch, nice for morning coffee and reading the paper, a deck off the master bedroom, and a lovely backyard with a patio. Behind us is a green belt, with hiking trails and bike path, connecting the town tennis courts and a children's playground on one end to a small lake and a state park at the other end.

Our home is within easy walking distance of the village with its shops and restaurants and is only a five-minute walk from the commuter rail station, with trains west to New York City and east to the Hamptons.

Babylon Village is an attractive, vibrant, walkable village, about a mile square, with many small shops and excellent restaurants. It's approximately an hour's train ride from New York City, an hour's drive to the Hamptons and the vineyards of the North and South forks, and within a short driving distance of numerous parks, beaches, and golf courses. The sandy beaches of Robert Moses State Park and its par-three golf course are a fifteen to twenty minute drive away, as is Captree State Park with its fleet of fishing boats. Hecksher and Sunken Meadow State Parks, with beaches, hiking trails, and other activities, are each about a twenty-minute drive; and a fifteen-minute drive will take you to ferries to Fire Island with its beaches and National Seashore. A fifteen-minute drive will also take you to Bethpage State Park, home of the Bethpage State Park Golf Course (site of the 2009 Open), tennis courts, and hiking trails, as well as weekly polo matches during the summer months, About twenty minutes away is a lovely arboretum which offers free musical events during the summer.

A few places of historic interest are Teddy Roosevelt's home at Sag Harbor, the Vanderbilt Museum, the Montauk LightHouse Museum, the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, and the Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

If you want to just relax or to go to the beach or make an occasional trip to the city, our home and village are an ideal location.--The village is accessible by train from JFK Airport.

Open to any dates

As our daughter lives in Portland, Oregon, we're especially interested at present in home exchanges there. In the future, we would be interested in considering just about any destination, including short exchanges (long weekends, perhaps) in New York City, Boston, Cape Cod, and Washington, D.C.

We're retired teachers. Larry was a math teacher and drama director. Sandra taught elementary school, as well as workshops for teachers throughout the United States. We have two grown children, one in the New York area and the other in Portland, Oregon. We enjoy frequent trips to New York City to plays, museums, cultural events at Lincoln Center, and the restaurants of all kinds, as well as travel to other parts of the United States and to overseas destinations.

English