When I lived in California I generally avoided Los Angeles. I don't like places where I have to drive for an hour to get just about anywhere. Distances between places in the Los Angeles area are deceptively huge. My cousins' home near the Hollywood sign was 35 miles from the house of a
friend who lives in a southern suburb of the LA megalopolis.
The exchange home we used as our half of a non-simultaneous winter holiday swap was located exactly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. While I normally fly in and out of SF, a decade after moving "back east" from Northern California, I now have more friends and relatives in LA than in the City by the Bay.
Travel, for me, is about human connection. On my honeymoon grand tour of Europe we visited cousins in several parts of France and Holland. Celebrating the wedding with family was one of the best parts of the trip.
Home exchange gives us entree into another culture. It is the opposite of the insular group tour or all-inclusive resort where access to another country is controlled or cut off entirely.
In Los Angeles my kids' Aunties took us to their favorite rides at Disneyland. My cousins showed us their neighborhood's amazing restaurants, including a Mexican place specializing in the cuisine of Oaxaca (think rich mole sauces), and a Thai grill where my children were served young coconut juice in actual coconuts whose flesh they scraped with a spoon after drinking the water.
But it was a friend I met through home exchange who showed us something really surprising. A woman who reads this blog lives in LA. We got to know each other through a mutual interest in both home exchange and bilingual education. She took us to a beach we would never have otherwise found. A short walk from the parking lot had our kids exploring tide pools teaming with creatures like sea cucumbers and experimenting, at our friend's urging, with making sea urchins snap shut at their touch.
When the tide started to come in we scurried over the rocks to a small aquarium nearby. Our friend had taken her daughter there many times. We saw several types of jellyfish, eels, fish, and many sea horses. Outside there were photo opp posters where our children put their heads into giant cut-outs of fish faces.
We have wonderful memories and photos of our adventures with our LA relatives and friends. It means even more to me that some of those special times were spent with someone I connected with purely through home exchange. It's why I do what I do, why I love home exchange so very much.
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