Let's start with the A,B,C of it...

A lot of people have been asking me recently what prompted us to exchange our home with people we've never met before, and it's a pretty simple answer: why not? Home exchange has been popular in Europe for years and has started to catch on in the States, although none of the Americans I told had ever heard about home swapping before.  It's more common in Europe, and the locals nod with understanding when we tell them what we're doing here. It seems that the general stereotype of Americans is that we're uptight, loud, and always looking for the biggest and the best of everything. Gigantic televisions, 400 cable channels, current generation iPod/iPhone, massive SUVs...and I still don't know what Hemi means. We are always in a hurry, so much so that we have drive-thru coffee, banking, pharmacies, laundry, fast food, liquor stores, curb side pickup for steaks and lobsters. We don't even have time to use our credit cards at the gas stations; we just click our card once and it knows who we are. We are even too busy to stop at the local video store to rent a movie; usually we watch it On Demand from cable, but if we absolutely must have it on DVD we have it sent to us in the mail. Expedited. And while we're driving back and forth to accomplish all of these things, some of us even catch up on our favorite TV shows which we've downloaded to our iPods and mount to our dashboards. Don't laugh, my old boss used to watch...yes, watch...new episodes of The Office while driving to work every morning. We have nice bicycles, which we dutifully load onto the backs of our cars and drive to the bike trail so we can enjoy nature or spend time as a family. In Europe, people ride their bikes to get from one place to another. Sometimes they even transport their kids or their groceries in fantastic cargo bikes (you know I am getting one of these) because they don't even own a car. Sure, part of the American stereotype applies to me: I love my big TV in my bedroom and I get cranky without high speed internet access, but that's about it. Our family and friends were amazed when we moved to Florida and downsized to only one car and a Vespa scooter. We were the only 2 adult family that I knew without a second car and we were often asked how we managed. Ridiculous! In Europe, many families have no car or only one car, and it is much less common to have a car for each driver. So why do we home exchange? Well, it gives a single-income family of four a chance to experince amazing new places and cultures that we could never afford if we paid for hotels, and we make new friends with people we never would have known (see picture - our neighbors invited us to a cookout in the circle). We live immersed in the culture rather than anonymously in a hotel. The best part, though, is that we get to disprove the American stereotype, one home exchange at a time.