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.

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