Elderly People Crossing. Exchanging Homes

This is my favorite street sign ever. It was on a street in a quaint town in England. We were there on a home exchange trip.

This morning I had an email from a lady in Ireland. It's someone I met online through Homelink, a home exchange website. We've had one home exchange in England and a couple of other attempts to arrange home exchanges, one in Ireland and another in France, but so far haven't been able to finalize either one. However, the one is Ireland may be a possibility another year. My Ireland contact will be visiting here in the U.S. sometime within the next couple of months and I'm helping her sort of put her trip together.

Home exchanging is a great way to save money when traveling anywhere. We've even received inquiries from people here in the U.S.. Just receiving an inquiry, however, doesn't guarantee that an exchange is imminent. When you set-up the search inquiry in Homelink, you specify dates of a potential exchange, preferred locations, adults with or without children, smoking or non-smoking, do we exchange cars, etc.. However, there are still things that have to be compatible. You have to be able to afford the airfare to get to the location and some of the more remote locations are difficult and expensive to even get there. Also, you may find out after emailing back and forth, that someone is allergic to animal fur and the owners have or had a cat or dog. Or, after "getting to know each other better", you may find that you are just not comfortable with the idea of these people in your home. All of the listings generally provide photographs of the outside of the home and others, like ours, provide other photographs of the inside. This gives the potential "exchangee" a good idea of what to expect if the exchange is arranged. Most of the people we have encountered are retired since we specify 2 adults only. However, many exchanges include children and teenagers.

WALES THE BEAUTIFULEST

Working Europeans seem to have a lot more vacation than Americans and of course retirees have even more time to travel, so most exchanges almost always involve a minimum of two weeks. However, most retirees want a month or more in order to make it worthwhile. We can only afford to do 2 weeks and so that limits us somewhat. However, we have found those willing to stay in our home for that period of time and then they travel to another exchange in the U.S. or just visit various sights here, staying in paid lodging.

One of the really cools things about a home exchange is that you live like the "natives", more or less. Grocery shopping was one of the most interesting things. The foods are fewer and there are similar brands, but the labels were slightly different. The dessert (or pudding as the English say) aisle was huge. We couldn't resist buying something special almost every time we shopped. The liquor aisle was also amply furnished with everything you could possibly want to drink.

We were on this trip just after 9/11 and it was very touching to see this sign posted on the doors of one of the fire stations in town. Traveling right after 9/11 was a whole new travel experience. The security was amazingly tight. It was a strange feeling to fly through Toronto enroute to England and see some airport personnel there with turbans on their heads. There were quite a few turbaned individuals in the airport lounge and some on the flight with us. It made me realize how easy it would be to assume that people of a certain nationality could be unfairly labeled. Every carry on bag was searched thoroughly, so I guess that considering the extra precautions, it was probably one of the safest times to fly ever

And finally, here's one last sign that I must share with you. Close up parking for that mother-to-be.

Cheerio old chaps!