New York Home Exchange 

We wanted a family vacation and wanted to save money through exchanging homes.  So in late March we started responding to home exchange listings across the USA and Canada.  

After we e-mailed 20 home exchange listings in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island,  Massachusetts, California, Texas, New Mexico, Hawaii and Ontario  and we soon found out that March was rather late to start looking for summer home exchange partners.  

To our surprise, we had replies that evening, all informing us they had already arranged a home exchange for the summer but to please try them again for next year.

The next day we received two more replies, the first from Texas explaining that they had plans this year but were open to arranging a home exchange another summer, the other from a couple in up state New York near Albany indicating they were interested in a home exchange from July 

From their very first email we could tell that Anita and Jim were warm, genuine down to earth people.  There wasn't a doubt in our mind, this is where we wanted to go and these were the people we wanted to have a home exchange.

We were open to going anywhere and New York hadn't even crossed our minds as a destination. Now, it would be our new home for two weeks.

A few days and several e-mails later we had the exchange arranged.

At first, I wondered why anyone from New York would want to come here.  We learned from others that this is a common thought.  Anita and Jim asked us the same question, "Are you sure you want to come to small community in New York?"

Over the next two months we exchanged emails, letters, brochures and pictures. We had planned to see Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island and the Bronx areas of New York City,  Albany and the Hudson Valley in New York State. We also planned to see the nearby Berkshire area of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

I want to add this point, we didn't have any photos of the inside of the New York exchange home, so the first time we saw the interior was when we opened the door.  Neither of us made a phone call and really there was no need as Anita and Jim, our New York home  exchange partners emailed several times a week with the most entertaining notes.

On July 1 we flew from Edmonton Alberta  to Montreal Quebec where we rented a car. The next day we drove the short distance to our home exchange house in a beautiful rural village south of Albany New York.

The exchange home was massive, with a large yard over looking a lake, swimming pool and screened porch.  We soon found that we ate our meals in the porch. Anita's and Jims kitchen had two large windows that swung open so one could easily transfer meals from the stove to the picnic table in the screened porch area.

Anita left us a wonderful casserole and plenty of other food and drinks in the fridge and cupboard. A wonderful thought.

With a three year old, we decided to use the exchange house as our hub, doing day journeys to the Hudson Valley, Albany, the magnificent Berkshires area in Massachusetts (20 minutes away) . We also got away for an overnight trip to the Connecticut coast(2 hours) where we saw the tall ships in New London and went to a fabulous beach in Rhode Island. 

We had wished we had visited New York City and Manhattan. Perhaps next time we will work on arranging a home exchange to Manhattan, Long Island or Brooklyn.

We also learned that a three year old isn't always interested in seeing the historic and cultural aspects of any region. Actually his only experience with culture was eating yogurt. 

We saved 12 nights accommodation cost, by traveling on a home exchange. A hotel for 12 nights in New York would have been over $1500.  Our cost with for our  New York home exchange, 12 nights was $ 0.

Our home exchange partners got to see Alberta's Rocky Mountains and Mountain Parks, along with the many exciting things in and around Edmonton, Calgary, Jasper and Banff.  Both families had a terrific time. As members, Anita and Jim got to choose which exchange request they wanted to accept. As we didn't list our home, we had to respond to  listings and hope that we could find someone who was interested in an exchange. We are very happy to have gone to New York on a home exchange and we highly recommend house swaps.