Home Exchange Adventure

Rita and Don
New Zealand Home Exchange

From New Zealand to Canada and the USA

September 2008

Rita and I arrived home Friday to a raging storm, of high winds and cold rain, but the New Zealand weather definitely cannot dampen our spirits at all.
 
We are now experienced home exchangers.
 
We have had a fantastic, awesome two months of travel to Canada, Alaska, back to Canada then onto Windsor, in Sonoma County just north of San Francisco.
 
What a blast!

To give you the background, during 2007, we were watching the Living Channel, and saw an English Television program about a family in a village somewhere in England, exchange their home, with a family in Boston USA for a month.
 
How the two families got on in each others homes and their experiences was filmed.
 

Beach house for swap
Russell, Bay of Islands, Northland, New Zealand

We thought that it was a great concept, and decided to put our beach house in Russell, Bay of Islands onto the home exchange website.
 
Within a couple of days the emails began to arrive from people that wanted to exchange their home for ours, from all corners of the globe. As our Beach house is a second home we are able to organize non simultaneous exchanges.

We were of course confronted with the situation of requests from people that only had one residence. They wanted to organize an exchange by coming to New Zealand during our summer months, but for us to go stay in their home during their winter. Rita and I are definitely not snow people although we would like to experience the snow, at some time in the future, but definitely, not on our first home exchange experience.
 

Rita and Don on their travels with one of their exchange cars.

For our first exchange we wanted to go somewhere where the seasons were heading into a summer, where it would be warm. We definitely did not imagine ourselves wrapped up in winter coats and gloves, huddled beside a fire and maybe having to shovel snow. We wanted to be somewhere warm.
 
Although we began having people stay at our home during January, February and March 08 from England we have banked time in their homes for when we travel to England and Europe for 2009. (To date, we now have 2 months banked.)