TRAVEL COSTS
When you travel, your biggest expense is usually lodging, followed by restaurant meals. With home exchange we eliminate or greatly lessen those expenses. Airfares can be costly, but not if you buy in advance or use frequent flier miles. To pare costs to the bone you can simply limit your home exchange travels to a day's drive from home. Here on the East Coast we can drive for no more than six or 7 hours and find ourselves in another country (Montreal or Toronto); Washington DC with its dozens of free museums and attractions; historic Philadelphia or Boston; mountains, beaches and so on. Long distance coaches go to all East Coast destinations for as little as $1 per ticket (more on this in another column).
WHERE TO GO?
Tour books are available for free from every region's tourism department. Get a few for your own area or a neighboring state/province/country. There are thousands of fascinating destinations near your home that you have never seen.
OUR 2008 HOME EXCHANGE ITINERARY
We sent out our holiday letter via email because we just never got it together to do a holiday card mailing this year. One relative wrote back to say we seem to travel as much as if we were retired. Little does she know how much we plan to travel when we are retired. It will make our current peregrinations look like a walk around the block.
Here is our 2008 itinerary from the holiday letter. If you want to hear a really funny holiday letter go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3DyxaCYlfg
"Our Home Exchange highlights of the year were concentrated in the summer, thanks to the new strictures of the kids� school schedule. We celebrated Independence Day weekend in...Canada. Not the most patriotic place to spend July 4th, but there were fireworks aplenty on the last day of the Montreal Jazz Fest. Montreal has an annual fireworks competition with fireworks displays presented nightly by a dozen countries. We picnicked on the river bank as the lights exploded overhead. A group of Hare Krishna men and women danced by, singing, in beautiful saffron robes. Our son watched in fascination then asked �Will the princesses come back?� The home exchange was a house we had used five years ago and it really felt like a home away from home.
Summer vacation in August found us on the best home exchange vacation ever. First we used a gorgeous house in the middle of the Napa vineyards. The home-owners run a day care center and treated our kids to a fun week of "camp". This allowed the adults in the family to tour wineries and visit gourmet restaurants without having to teach the little ones the proper way to decant burgundy.
We then flew from Napa to British Columbia and had a home exchange in upscale West Vancouver. The house was nestled in a redwood forest. We gave Grandpa the luxurious master suite on the main floor so he could avoid the stairs. We used a cozy guest room nestled above the floor of the redwood grove by a gurgling stream. After a week of hiking, biking, touring the city and eating the freshest sushi and fish we had ever had we reluctantly returned to NYC.
During leaf-peeping season we had a quick weekend home exchange to New Paltz in upstate New York. The trees were magnificent, as was the beer at the local brew pub.
We are spending mid- to late-December at a 1928 exchange "cottage" (that�s LA movie star language; it has five bedrooms!)."
OK, it goes on from there but reading other people's holiday letters is generally rather boring, even (or especially) when home exchange is involved. Our 2008 trips don't represent that much travel, though. We did 3 long weekend swaps over the course of the year. We took two weeks during August to spend a week in each of two different West Coast homes. Now, for Winter Break we have a week, and the weekend days on either side of it, in another swap home. You can see that it's easy to rack up 6 separate swaps over the course of a year if you get three weeks of vacation or even just the standard long holiday weekends.
The total fixed cost for these vacations, over and above what we would have spent at home, was about $100 in gas money for the three local weekend swaps, and an average of $250 per person for flights on the West Coast trips. We used the home exchangers' cars on the long distance trips so our only other unavoidable expenditures were groceries for breakfasts and lunches at the swap homes and dinner out most nights at a restaurant.
The economy isn't in great shape, so leverage your most valuable asset, your home, to vacation in 2009. Whether you rent or own, someone out there wants to see your vibrant city or genuine small town. Happy Swapping New Year!
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