There are always surprises in a new exchange home. Most of these are wonderful, but some...are not. Ideally, a swap listing features extensive photos of each room in the house. The coastal California place we headed to after visiting our Los Angeles friends was a real surprise.
The first challenge we had was locating the house. Whenever we get to an unfamiliar exchange home in the dark, there are challenges. We always use a global positioning system (GPS) to find the swap home. But GPS devices are only accurate within about 50 feet. That can help narrow down the address to several homes, but in a dark rural setting this may not be helpful. Ringing a neighbor's doorbell at 10pm, or trying to open their door with the exchangers' key, may not go well.
Swappers sometimes say "it's the two-story green house" or something similar, but I rarely find this sort of subjective clue terribly helpful, especially in the dark. What's more helpful is a well-lit street number, but the swap family went on vacation two weeks before we arrived at their home. They chose not to leave their porch light on for two weeks, so we pulled up at a dark house with no visible house number. Luckily, the exchangers had asked us to start their Volkswagon Beetle. This was parked in the driveway, so we eventually found the house by recognizing the car.
We weren't sure exactly what we would find when we opened the door. There were not that many photos of the interior of the house. That didn't matter because we saw the view from the living room, which was the broad Pacific ocean. Any swap home that close to the sea would work out just fine.
When we opened the door of the house it looked perfectly clean and very comfortable. We were "home", at least for the next two weeks.
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