One Home Exchange, Four Countries

Hello from the hamlet of Lutzenberg, Switzerland. We’ve just arrived for the first leg of our “Around the World in 86 days” extravaganza.

Having spent much of the past 6 months carefully crafting and refining the most challenging adventure yet, I am delighted and relieved to just start! My intention is to write more regularly (and less lengthily) so you can come along for the ride.

You’ve never heard of Lutzenberg. Neither had I. But the location, at the crossroads (or cross-lake, more accurately) of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can’t be beat.  Nor can the view from our oversized terrace facing Lake Constance, known here as Bodensee. If we look to the right, we see Austria. If we look straight across the lake, we see Germany. Meanwhile, “home” is in the bucolic canton of Appenzell in Switzerland.

To give an example of how this four country thing comes into play, yesterday I woke up in Switzerland and drove to Austria so that I could get a train to Germany to meet a friend. Tonight we are going to Liechtenstein for dinner. I will say it can sometimes get a bit confusing as Switzerland and Liechtenstein are on one currency – the Swiss franc – and Austria and Germany use the Euro. But these are good problems to have.

This is our 10^th home exchange over the past 20 years and the third in Switzerland. Other destinations have included Costa Rica, Canada, Austria, France, Germany, England, and Manhattan.  We have both proactively sought out desirable locations and also responded positively to requests from abroad. For each actual exchange, we wistfully turn down a LOT of other possibilities.

Our initial interest in the idea sprung when we had young kids; we wanted them to experience foreign cultures and live like locals. We also wanted more space (and less financial outlay) than a hotel would entail. It’s no fun having to be perfectly quiet adults in a single hotel room when your kids’ bedtime is 8pm and you’re in Vienna. Or anywhere else.

Over the years, we’ve had numerous conversations with friends and family about the concept of home exchanging. These conversations typically fall into 3 camps.  In “Camp Full Speed Ahead” are a handful of friends who heard of our great experiences, immediately saw the benefits of exchanging and began trading homes themselves. If you fall in this category, here’s a tip – we use Homelink as our resource. It’s user-friendly and Katie is responsive and great to work with.

In “Camp Hmmm” are those who are intrigued and might consider swapping one day, but have hurdles to overcome such as “what if no one would want to live in my home/area?” or “what if they break something?”. 

And finally, there is “Camp No Way in Hell” which typically has to do with the discomfort of having “strangers” sleeping in your beds, eating on your dishes and driving your car. No judgment. Perfectly understandable.

All of these reactions are realistic. I subscribe to the philosophy that each of us gets to choose things in life based on our own comfort level. (This does NOT explain how I wound up on an electric scooter in Berlin or a brake-less snowmobile in Yosemite.) In our case, that means swapping homes. For us, the value and benefit of the exchange far outweighs the negatives.

And there are negatives!

For example, before leaving for an extended period of time, I felt obliged to deep clean my home. This included purging my fridge, downsizing items in my pantry and making room in my closet/drawers for incoming guests. The clothes hamper needed to be empty. Files and family memorabilia needed to be locked away or housed elsewhere. Because of potential wildfires, I made sure to carefully label anything that should be grabbed during an evacuation.  We left fixings for the first couple of meals and a comprehensive instruction manual covering how things work in our home, where to shop and eat and hike locally. Plus contact numbers for neighbors, doctors, what to do in the event of an emergency, as well as a personalized letter giving permission to drive our car. It’s not nothing.

But the advantages? Well, here we are in a spectacular corner of Europe in a sizable domicile.

We have a home and a car for over a month – all free. We can’t get enough of the lake views. And when we tire of those, the vineyards just left of the lake will do.

We have inherited a thriving garden with tomatoes, blueberries, squash and herbs. We can tell time by the church bells which share airwaves with the cowbells. We watch the sky change and the boats drift peacefully on the lake while sitting still. A zeppelin carves its way across the sky.

Occasionally, on the hill right behind our home, a flock of sheep grazes contentedly. Edelweiss grows by our front door. We short-circuit the sometimes frustrating path to “figuring stuff out” because our exchange partners have also left us information on the best local coffeehouses and restaurants, hikes, farmers markets, and cultural opportunities.

Meanwhile, our plants are being watered, our mail is collected, and our home is cared for. In the old days when we had dogs or cats, we also exchanged pet care – quite a perk!

So, yes, we are raving fans of home exchanging – even if we don’t encounter Jack Black, Kate Winslet or Cameron Diaz from The Holiday on our exchanges.

Here are a few highlights from our first 4 days.

Farmers Markets in Bregenz and Hohenems: the array of seasonal fruits and vegetables is dazzling. At the Turkish stall, we also got wrinkly black olives, tender dried figs, and homemade seasoned rice crackers.  What a treat to find an abundance of Italian prune plums (called Zwetschgen) still sporting their blue blush.

The best local coffeehouse, Café Schallert, is in the town of Höchst (Austria) but sits within spitting distance of the border. 

It serves delicious coffee and equally delicious ice cream. Judging by the looks of the pastries, they won’t taste too terrible. I intend to do much more research here. 😊

Bregenzer Festspiele – for 4 weeks each summer, an opera is staged on Lake Constance in the Austrian town of Bregenz, about 25 minutes from our home away from home. We were fortunate to be able to snag some elusive tickets to this year’s performance of Madame Butterfly. The show starts at 9pm which means you can watch the sun set over the lake.

The world’s largest floating stage is fully on the lake. Seating capacity is close to 7000! It all makes for quite an event. So much so that our fun friends from Berlin drove all the way (8 hours!) to join the merriment!

It’s happy hour time here so I must sign off. Our home exchange partners left us a couple of bottles of champagne chilling in the fridge and two glasses on the kitchen counter next to a vase of fresh flowers. Did I mention we really like this home exchange thing?