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. ...