House Swap New Zealand

Rita and Don
House Swap NZ

From New Zealand to Canada and the USA

(cont'd)

For our first experience we decided that we would go off in another direction and began looking at exchange requests from Canada and the USA – from people that were able to also offer non simultaneous exchanges.
 
We also looked at the possibility that we could incorporate a couple of home exchanges during a trip and from the countless offers, three immediate possibilities took our fancy.
 
1. A request was to exchange a lake side home at Paul Lake, about 25 minutes north east of the town of Kamloops situated in Canada’s Rocky Mountains.
 
2. Came from Calgary in Alberta,
 
3. From Sonoma County north of San Francisco.
 
We began by looking at maps, and looking on the Internet as to what where and how, and so we planned our trip by accepting to exchange with the three homes. The San Francisco people have since stayed in our home, and the Calgary and Kamloops people are yet to stay and have booked during December and later in January 09.

The town of Kamloops in
the Rocky Mountains Canada.

Kamloops was up in the Rocky Mountains, and we discovered that the Rocky Mountaineer, the train with the glass domes on top of the cars, stopped at Kamloops on its way to Calgary. The Rocky Mountaineer train took 2 days to travel from Vancouver to Calgary, but did not have sleeping carriages. The train stopped for the night of the first day and all passengers slept in Hotels in Kamloops.
 
The train then continued the next day to either Jasper or Calgary.
 
We enquired of the train people about breaking the journey, and then catching the second part of the trip, Kamloops to Calgary in 14 days time. The Rocky Mountaineer Company obliged.

Our Cruise ship Serenade of
the Seas at Skagway Alaska.

We also saw that at the end of May the Cruise ships were repositioned from the Caribbean and began their cruising from Seattle or Vancouver to Alaska, and so a cruise was a distinct possibility.
 
We also noted that the Calgary Stampede, the largest Rodeo in the world happened during the first two weeks of July and then Sonoma County, near Napa valley in California, USA boasted they had wonderful weather, great wines and plenty of things to do, so those three exchanges worked with us, and we were able to accommodate the times and dates the owners required of our beach house.

City of Vancouver Canada.

At the end of May we flew from Auckland to Los Angeles, then onto Vancouver Canada.