Home Swap: From Hampshire UK to Long Island NY
by Lynette Lowthian
16 September 2008
We’d visited America several times before our first house swap and thought we’d got the lifestyle sussed. I knew they could barely get through doorways with their pizza takeouts, that they were disturbingly nationalistic (‘God bless our troops’ and all that) and that the Midwest was full of rednecks, lonely gas stations and highways leading into the sky.
But that’s nothing to what you can discover when you literally swap lives with someone else. Which is what we did when we exchanged our pint-size home in Hampshire with a ranch on Long Island NY. How else would I know that liquor is can’t be bought for love nor money at any point along the Long Island Expressway on Sunday afternoons? Or that it’s the done thing for dogs over there to drink from the loo? Some friends still don’t believe that one, but trust me, it’s true.
It was one of those years when we didn’t have much money but wanted to do a biggish trip. An American work colleague put us in touch with one of her old schoolfriends – this saved us money on using an agency (see below) but was pretty brave of my colleague, who was putting herself right in the firing line if anything went pear-shaped on either side of the pond.
We arranged to overlap at the Americans’ end because they were worried we’d be overpowered by their big dogs, but happily we were too overpowered by the sheer size of their home to even notice the two black beasts chomping and spitting at our ankles. You could have fitted four of ours into it, and their walk-in wardrobe was about the size of our entire bedroom.
We had the loan of our hosts’ massive station wagon complete with a doctor-on-call sticker, which meant we could park pretty much anywhere we liked. I had bad feelings about our humble Ford Focus, but even more so about our matrimonial bed, which suddenly seemed very narrow and very lumpy compared with their capacious king-size. We buoyed ourselves up with idea that Americans do everything bigger and (in some cases) better than us – that’s what they’re on the planet for. We also consoled ourselves with the notion that ‘little’ and ‘quaint’ (not to mention ‘old’) were probably part of the package for them.
Thankfully, we were right: they just loved our dinky houses, cars, shops, towns and even beds, and we all agreed we’d definitely do it again.
House Swap Tips
• To make the initial contact, ask friends and colleagues for possible contacts or register with a home-swap website – it’ll cost you around £30 for a year’s sign-up.
• Get to know your fellow swappers in advance – by telephone and email. If you’d feel more comfortable actually meeting the people who are going to stay in your home, try to arrange an overlap.
• Swap with people who have children roughly the same age. Their houses will be geared up to your needs, and they will probably have all the gadgets and gizmos that you make their place a ‘home from home’.
• It might be time-consuming, but try to do a ‘life inventory’ – a list not only of where everything is in the house and how it works but also recommended restaurants, shops and places of local interest.
• Don’t let it spoil your holiday if your hosts’ lifestyle is different to yours. Go with the flow. So what if their house is bigger or their garden is a wilderness? This is about swapping experience – and it’s only for a couple of weeks.
• Contact your car insurer and ask your host to contact theirs to find out how to get a temporary ‘guest’ driver put on your respective policies if needed.
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