Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Our first Home-Swapping Experience

One of the more immediate parts of getting ready for our Ireland & UK Trip next year was to set up a Home-Swap with a family in Ireland. We have now started this process and have our fingers crossed that a swap will pan out quickly as this is our first time and we'd like to get things secured ASAP.

In case your not familiar with the concept of Home Swapping, the way it works is just as the name implies; you swap homes with someone in the destination you would like to travel to. For us we will hopefully be trading homes for several weeks with a family in Ireland; they will use our house/car and we theirs. Not only is one of the easiest ways to drastically reduce the cost of an extended vacation, but more importantly it gives you the opportunity to experience a new land from a place of comfort. Rather than living out of our suitcases for 2 or 3 weeks, we should be able to enjoy a slice of somewhat normal life just with different surroundings/people.

HouseSwap Photo
Photo we posted on our home swap page

Also, we are also really looking forward to getting to know a new family from Ireland who we can hopefully stay close with for a while. Meeting new people and making friends is one of the great things that you can totally miss out on when traveling conventionally as a tourist.

We are going through a web-based HomeSwapping Site with thousand of homes up for swap each year all over the world. Its actually pretty cool to see whats available in some pretty exotic places, but for this year we have or sights set on Ireland. So this Saturday I went out and took some pictures of the house and yard, and typed up a description of our Home/Area/Family, and posted them to the home swap site. You can view our listing here if you are interested.

HouseSwap Photo
Nice looking place eh!

So now, we can either just leave it and pray about it, hoping someone will seek us out, or we can go and try and find someone who we want to swap with and be proactive about doing so. We will probably do a little of both in the end and leave it in the Lords hands...

1 comment:

Joe Taylor said...

Nice! Be sure to get a place with a spare room for me :)