Thinking About This Year’s Home Swap (Premium)

Friday night, my family is flying to Stockholm, Sweden for our 13th annual home swap. Which means that the stress level is set to 11.

It’s supposed to get easier: The more you do something, the better at that thing you get, and whatever stresses or issues that dogged you early on should disappear. That works with most things, I guess. But travel has always been problematic for me. Traveling with my wife ratchets up the stress. And traveling with the kids bumps it up yet again.

But preparing for a home swap is the worst: In addition to the normal travel stuff, we have to clean and prepare our home so that another family, usually from Europe, can live in it for three weeks.

And, of course, this is the first year we’ll do a home swap with the new home in Pennsylvania, so that has added an even further level of stress. We have a lengthy document that we prepare for the house, and the version for the Dedham home was updated every year for over a decade. This year, we had to start over.

I also used to have a lockable area for storing electronics and private documents, but the new house lacks that. So we’re relying on my sister and brother-in-law, who have allowed us to temporarily move that stuff to their house nearby.

And in keeping with my theory that nothing terrible could not in some way still be made worse, we have the additional stress of my son, who is flying to meet us at JFK so we can also fly together from there to Stockholm. And then he will fly home by himself from Stockholm, since he can only take a week off from work.

So I stew. And I worry. I wake up early and stare at the ceiling. And I wait to just be on the plane, when I feel like the stress level will finally come down.

“You must be so excited about the trip,” a countless number of family and friends has said, in some form, over the past week or so.

Yeah, sort of.

I’m glad we’re finally going back to our traditional three-week stay. In 2016 (Paris) and 2017 (Barcelona), for unrelated reasons, we were only able to swing two-week trips.

I’m glad my son is coming at all. He opted out in 2016 because he was preparing to head off to college and wanted to maximize his time with his friends. But he regretted not coming and did come along again in 2017. I’ll take the week he can spare as a better alternative to nothing. And realize that, as he gets older, these opportunities are simply starting to drift away.

Stockholm … is an unknown. It was never really on our radar, and we were hoping for something in Italy, Spain, or France this year. But the one thing that strikes me about the place is how many people I know who have either been there themselves and absolutely love it, or know someone who does. So I’m hopeful.

We have friends coming out again—yet another form of stress—and while we usually do a side-trip with them, our plans around that (St. Petersburg, Russia, initially, then something involving Helsinki and Tallinn) kind of fell apart. But we are at least going to Berlin for four days with the kids, separately. I do love that place.

But stressed. Still stressed.

This year will mark the first time we’ve flown on a budget airline for a home swap, in this case Norwegian Air. This is only notable because they have strict requirements about the size and weight of the bags you can carry-on. I only carry-on, period, even to Europe. So this has required a rethinking about what I bring.

I’ll write up a “What I Use” post for the trip once we’re there, but the short version is that I usually bring at least two laptops and a ton of electronics. This year I’m bringing much less, and it will be weird to be away for that long and not have access to as many things as I’m used to.

That said, we do travel light. When we were flying home from Lyon, France in 2015, the person who checked us in looked at our small bags and asked how long we had been in the country. When I told him three weeks, he said, “And that’s all you brought? That is impressive.” Maybe. But we will be bringing even less this time. Should be interesting.

Of course, one of the many benefits of home swapping—in addition to the massive savings and the ability to live in a new place like a local—is that you have laundry and other niceties available to you, just as you do at your own home. But suffice to say, I’ll be rotating through a very small selection of clothes for this trip.

And in a perfectly-timed way to close this out, my wife just informed me that the car key we mailed to Sweden weeks ago is still stuck in some facility in New York and will not reach the family there in time. We will be leaving our car in a garage at JFK so that when they arrive, they can simply use the key they received, find the car, and drive it to our home. But now we’ll need to figure something out, and we don’t have any way to meet them at the airport. (They are literally arriving on the plane we will fly to Stockholm.)

So yet another wonderful thing to stress over. Great.

Anyway. I have a few travel-related articles on the way, in addition to that “What I Use” post. As usual, I’ll be working normally, minus a few days off, during this trip. Which I am eager to begin.