For a good 10 years Blonde has contemplated the idea of doing a home exchange in order to travel more cheaply (financially, she’s already quite cheap morally ) and stay longer in one place (sounds sexual too). But contemplating and actually doing it never got together (home exchange, that is) until meeting Nola of NewTakeTravel at the TBEX bloggers’ conference in Girona, Spain last September.
Nola has done dozens of home exchanges and helped Blonde get her home listed and start the process in a joint post we did in January. Nola said Boston would be an easy location to swap and she was right! It’s as if I’m the hot sexy mess on Match.com and everyone is vying for me to say “yes”! And just like that girl I want to say “yes” to almost everyone!
In 2 months I have had 24 home exchange offers representing 10 countries. And we aren’t talking the home equivalents of the “large, comfortable in their own bodies ” guys on Match.com who live with their pet hamsters.
I hope none of these happen to be your home but it’s too much fun to not share with you some of the places that have been offered. My first flirtation was brief – a fabulous home in a golfing development in Scottsdale, Arizona. It included its own sunken stadium tennis court and salt water pool with palm trees. Brunette doesn’t get Arizona – hot and no ocean – what’s the point? Blonde is politically incompatible with the gun-toting anti-immigration policies of the state so basically the relationship was over before it began. Kind of like getting a wink from Mitt Romney. A momentary “really, he’s interested in me“? followed immediately by the realization “Oh, but I’m not interested in him“.
And then that guy on the TV ads for dating sites, the guy with gray hair, a charmingly horny look in his eyes and startlingly successful dental work? He held out his hand and beckoned to me! He said “come away to a fabulous town in the Costa Brava and spend a month wrapped in my modern, yet warm, embrace. Let me whisk you to Andorra and over the border to France. Then we can go to my other home, in Madrid, and you can explore Madrid, Seville, Cordoba. You will want for nothing.”
I made him show me full frontal nudity photographs of every room – just like Nola instructed – so it wouldn’t turn out that the bathroom was an outhouse or the pool a leak from the roof.
And both properties were fabulous! Take a look at these shots of the place in Calella de Palafrugell, Spain.
Wipe your drool off my pictures!
True, I had no plans to go back to Spain so soon but this was a no-risk way to live as a faux resident in another country for a month. And to live there in style and comfort – for free!
How would I talk Brunette into joining me? She has set plans for every July. But she’ll “come for part of the time”. Stay tuned to see how much that “part” ends up being.
Oh, and that home in Madrid we can also spend time in if we choose? What’s it like? Yes, it has a home theater which is one of our minimum requirements but is it big enough for one or two women? Let’s see:
What could be better? The owners of the homes in Costa Brava and Madrid (the same people in case that hasn’t been clear) actually live in Dubai now and have invited Blonde and Brunette to have drinks with them in their lux (we assume) expat apartment when we’re there in mid-March!
The mother and daughter will be coming to Boston because the daughter, a beautiful girl with a voice to match, is coming to a summer program at Berklee College of Music in Boston. (I’ve been stalking her on YouTube which is how I know of her vocal and physical beauty.)
She’s too young to live in a dorm on her own. (Brunette sent Blonde to live in a brothel on her own at that age and she turned out, oh never mind, maybe not as good an example as it seemed at first…)
The woman in the couple is American and once lived about 5 blocks from where Blonde now lives so won’t require a lot of orientation information. This is almost creepily full of coincidences isn’t it?
The key exchange ceremony will take place in Dubai and then we will officially be home exchangers in-waiting. (I wonder if we’ll wear promise rings?)
Oh, home exchanging, you have fed my addiction with a better, lower priced drug than the one that got me hooked on travel in the first place!
Let Nola of NewTakeTravel help you too – check out her site and ask questions. She’s Canadian so much more polite than Blonde and won’t steer you wrong.
At least not on purpose.