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In the summer of 2009, I read a book published a few months earlier that would change my entire mode of traveling for the next 9 years. It was called Wanderlust and Lipstick: The Essential Guide for Women Traveling Solo by Beth Whitman, who hailed from Seattle, Washington. Beth Whitman must have been one of the first women to publish a book that gave females the encouragement and confidence to venture out on their own and travel the world. Well, anyway, it was the first book I read on the subject, and it couldn’t have been released at a better time for me.
She described her own travels, her tips for doing so safely, gear she recommended, how to apply for passports and visas, some mistakes she made, and lessons she learned along the way. It was just the thing I needed to read, freshly divorced and needing a push out the door.
But even before the nuts and bolts of the “how-to” chapters, Beth got into the “why” and “why not” arguments of traveling alone—things that women struggle with all the time. In a section entitled “Getting Beyond the Excuses,” Beth dismantles each of them, one by one:
I would feel vulnerable (addressing safety issues)
I’m in a relationship and/or I have children
I don’t feel comfortable eating alone
Being alone is lonely
I’ll get bored
I’m shy
I’m too old
I wouldn’t know where to go
I can’t take time off from work
I have an illness/disability
What if I get lost?
What if I get sick?
I only speak English
What will other people think?
I don’t think I can afford to travel.
If I had any excuses left for not leaving the house after reading that chapter, I can’t imagine what they might have been. Maybe I’d miss an episode of “Modern Family”? All my misgivings were either dealt with or I knew there was a solution to be had on the fly.1
For me, the biggest barrier to traveling alone was financial. I wasn’t particularly timid and I wasn’t afraid to eat alone or to attend things alone. Being self-employed, my schedule was flexible. But I did like to go to new and exotic places and that was really difficult on one income.
Addressing the affordability issue, one thing she recommended stood out to me. I had heard about this but didn’t know if it was safe to do: home exchanges. I was surprised to come across a whole section devoted to this—“Home Swaps and Homestays”—and one of the sites she recommended was www.homeexchange.com. In this program, individuals list their homes by taking photos of their property, describing the amenities of their home and their town’s local attractions, and when they would be available for an exchange. People who want to visit that part of the world type in a search and if there is a match, your home pops up in the search results. If you all come to an agreement, an exchange is made. No money exchanges hands between the parties. The author recommended this as a safe and comfortable way to visit other parts of the world while saving tremendous amounts of money.
Wow, did this intrigue me! I had seen this concept a few years earlier in the 2006 movie “The Holiday,” which starred Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, and Jack Black. But I thought that was just a made-up Hollywood script—real people didn’t actually do that, did they? And especially everyone becoming cozy friends afterward?
I hopped on my computer and looked up the Home Exchange URL, and I’ll be darned…there it was. A full-fledged home exchange program for travelers. I read the FAQ, which thoroughly answered all my questions about how this worked—how to photograph and describe your home, how to prepare your home for strangers staying there, how to safeguard valuables, what to do if you have pets, how to put together a binder for your guests that would help them navigate your hometown. In 2009, there was a $150-per-year membership fee to list your home in the program.
All my doubts quickly evaporated. This sounded like a great way that I could travel to some cool places on one income. Considering that you could spend that $150 fee easily in one night at a hotel…
The potential money savings sank in the more I thought about it. After airfare, hotel stays are the biggest expense of any travel plan. After that, it’s the eating out for three meals a day. I considered the huge advantages of having a full kitchen at my disposal. After a quick grocery store run, and potentially eating at least one, if not two, meals in that kitchen, I could be traveling on my own quite reasonably.
This was going to be genius! I was in.2
That summer I took photos of my newly renovated house, as well as some scenic shots around Rockport and the area, and created an account on the home exchange website. One of my major work contracts always wrapped up just before Thanksgiving, and I usually had time off between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Below are some of the “local color” photos I uploaded to the site, in addition to pics of my home.
Left: Our small marina on Rockport’s Little Bay. Right: Mom’s Bait Shop, a popular stop at the marina. Photos by the author, August 2009. Click to enlarge.
Left: Rockport beach park, our 1-mile-long beach in the middle of the city. Sharp-eyed readers of my first memoir will also recognize this as the cover photo I chose for Art and Artifice. Right: Sunset shot taken at Ingleside, Texas, about 13 miles down the coast from Rockport, after kayaking with a group of friends. Photos by the author, August 2009. Click to enlarge.
I started searching for my first exchange to take place over the 2009 holidays. I left the destination wide open, posting that I would be willing to go play in the snow somewhere, if there were people who wanted to escape the cold and come relax on our Gulf Coast beaches for a few weeks.
It didn’t take long to find a match with that sales pitch. My first inquiry came from a husband and wife in Salt Lake City, Utah, a place I’d never been and was happy to go visit. We agreed on an exchange for about 3 ½ weeks over Christmas and New Year’s. So that was set and it was a new adventure I very much looked forward to.
***
In the meantime, I had a big event I was planning—a birthday party. Mine! My birthday was coming up in October. I’d never given myself a birthday party before, but I was newly settled in this town. I decided it was time to introduce myself properly.
Up next: Chapter 12. My Birthday Bash
To catch up on the backstory of A Buzz Kill Named Harvey, read Art and Artifice: A Memoir—A Story of Love, Deception, and Healing on the Texas Gulf Coast
As the book was written in 2009, many of the how-to sections now need updating. But this section is still relevant and evergreen.
The home exchange program turned out to be one of the best things I’d ever discovered. It became a permanent part of my lifestyle until I left Rockport in 2018; I sometimes made several exchanges per year. I indeed made some permanent friendships through the program. It was an adventurous and relatively risk-free way to travel that saved me an enormous amount of money. My home was never damaged nor did I experience any theft. And in case you are wondering, I am not an affiliate of the home exchange website and do not receive a commission from them.
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