What I Use: Home Swap 2019 (Premium)

As I write this, we’re about two-thirds of the way through this year’s home swap, which is taking place near Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

We’ve done 15 home swaps overall since 2006, 14 of them multi-week trips in the summer. Since moving to Thurrott.com in January 2015, we’ve been on five home swaps, including this year. We visited Stockholm, Sweden (with a side-trip to Berlin, Germany) in 2018, Barcelona, Spain in 2017, Paris, France in 2016, and Lyon, France (with a side-trip to Venice, Italy) in 2015. We generally spend three weeks on these swaps, but the 2016 and 2017 swaps were just two-week visits because of other circumstances (our son heading off to college in 2016 and the family moving to Pennsylvania in 2017).

This year’s swap is both unusual—in that we didn’t go through Intervac, as we usually do—and traditional, in that we’re swapping with friends we’ve known for about 20 years, and this is the third time we’ve swapped with them (the others were in 2009 and 2013). In an interesting twist, both of our families have moved (us from Boston to Pennsylvania, them from Amsterdam to Hilversum), so it was a new experience for all of us.

Because we’ve been to Amsterdam many, many times—I’ve come here alone and with my wife and family several times outside of home swaps—we figured we would focus less on that city and more on some surrounding smaller cities like Haarlem, Amersfoort, Utrecht, and the like, and that we’d typically travel around by train, given The Netherland’s amazing and efficient train system.

And that’s sort of worked out. We have indeed spent more time outside of Amsterdam than in, but the train has proven to be quite expensive when traveling with three or four people between cities. So we’ve mixed that up with driving as well.

We’re staying in Hilversum, which is about 20 minutes by train to Amsterdam and about a 30-minute drive to Schiphol, Europe’s best airport. I had never heard of this town, but it is absolutely gorgeous and packed with great restaurants, bars, stores, and walking paths.

We traditionally try to schedule a 3-to-4 day side-trip each year, and with our son Mark joining us for the middle 10 days of the swap, we knew that would be the time. But we had an exceptionally hard time booking the side trip ahead of the swap, for reasons that are too tedious to explain. Our top choices were London (which the kids had irritatingly picked over Paris, my top choice), Rome, and Germany. We’ve visited each in the past, in some cases many times. But London was too expensive, Rome would be too hot, and so we eventually settled on Germany.

The goal for this trip was to revisit a place that Steph and I had visited back in 2003 without the kids: A hotel castle on the Rhine River in Oberwesel, Germany. Since we could drive there in 3.5 hours, we’d save money (and aggravation) on airfare, and could splurge a bit for that one night.

And then we worked out a three-stop trip that included two places we’d never visited, Luxembourg and Koblenz, Germany, where the Rhine and Mosel rivers converge. It was fantastic.

Getting Mark to Europe proved to be another terrible experience for this poor kid: His flight from Rochester to JFK was canceled because of weather, and then the replacement fly I booked him on (in the middle of the night here) was delayed three times and then canceled too. He eventually flew the next day instead, after we all lost a night of sleep. But the side-trip went well, at least. Hopefully, Mark’s return flights, which are today, go better.

It seems like we hit a heatwave in Europe each summer, but this year it was pretty mild. We did have two 100-degree days in a row, and the second of the two—when we were visiting Haarlem—-was pretty bad. But beyond that, it’s been fine. (Which is nice, because most homes in Europe, including this one, do not have AC.)

But from a technology perspective, the home we’re staying in is more advanced than our home in Pennsylvania. They have 500/500 Mbps Internet, Ethernet ports in every room, USB ports on many power plugs, a smart TV, Sonos speakers all over the house, and Nest smart sensors.

This is good because I’m not on vacation, aside from the four days I took off for the side-trip (during which I still wrote, of course). Instead, I work from here each day, just as I do at home. Well not exactly. The schedule is quite different because of the time change. Typically, I’ll get up in the morning, work for 2-3 hours, and then we’ll head out. We usually eat lunch out and visit some city, town, or other place. And then we get back home between 3 and 5 pm local time, which is 9 to 11 am back in Pennsylvania. I will continue working then, record podcasts at the normal time as needed (Windows Weekly happens from 2-4 pm ET, so that’s 8-10 pm local time), and finish up by 8 pm or (unless I have a podcast). We eat dinner (and breakfast, for those who do eat it) at home every day.

This schedule works amazingly well for me. Is, in fact, quite sustainable. I don’t know exactly what will happen as the kids grow up and both head off to college and then their own lives in the future. But if life ever takes us in a direction where my wife and I could spend more time in Europe each year, I feel like I could maintain this schedule pretty indefinitely. We’ll see.

The other family also has a Tesla, but we’ve been mostly using their other car, which has Android Auto, so we can access Google Maps right from the in-car display. Very nice.

From a travel perspective, I go light. Always. That means I carry-on all my bags, and I always travel with luggage—the Rick Steves Ravenna Rolling Case—that meets the European standards for size/weight, even when I fly within the U.S. I brought 4-5 days of clothes, and we of course have laundry here. So that hasn’t been an issue.

That said, because I am working from here, I did bring more technology with me than I would normally. So instead of my normal laptop bag, which I wrote about back in 2015, I brought a larger eBags Professional Slim Junior Laptop Backpack that can easily hold two (or more) laptops with their chargers, multiple phones, headphones, and other gadgets. It’s a great bag.

I brought two laptops, a Microsoft Surface Book 2 (13.5-inch) and a Lenovo ThinkPad T490s, which I’ll be reviewing. Surface Book 2 is the workhorse, and it has performed wonderfully, as expected. I brought my Microsoft Surface Precision Mouse (which can easily switch between up to three PCs), but have never needed it.

I brought several phones, but have only been using two regularly: My Google Pixel 3a XL, which is my main phone and on Project Fi, and the Huawei P30 Pro, which has a Project Fi data SIM and is used for all photography during the trip.

I also brought my 9.7-inch Apple iPad for reading (daily) and watching movies on the plane.

As always, I brought a gadget bag with various chargers, cables, and other gadgets, plus international power adapters and my wonderful Anker Power Port Cube travel power strip, which provides three 3-port power plugs and 3 USB ports. I brought a USB headset for the podcasts, but it broke, so I’ve been using my friend’s headset and will have to buy a new one when I get home. I brought a USB-C dock with Ethernet but never needed it because my friend has an Ethernet-connected Surface Hub which I use during the podcasts. I’ve been on Wi-Fi otherwise.

From an AV perspective, we’ve been casting Netflix and YouTube content from my phone to the smart TV here, and that’s worked great.

Out in the world, we rely on Google Maps extensively, not just for directions but for restaurant recommendations. We also rely on Google Translate, and I had everyone download Dutch and German so we could all read non-English menus when required, offline. I’ve been posting photos to Instagram (public) and Facebook (private). And backing up my phone photos to both Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive.

We fly home next Thursday.