We are not hardcore couchsurfers, but we've stayed with one before.
If you don't know what couchsurfing is, here's a quick education. It's an online social networking tool for finding people to host you, or to offer your guest room (or couch) to others, for free.
When I tell people that my family occasionally couchsurfs, I often hear something along the lines of "That would make me nervous," or "I could never do that," or "Maybe when the kids are grown and on their own."
First, what are the advantages of staying with friends or family while traveling? A free bed? Home-cooked meal? Sharing a genuine connection with your company? Getting the true local flavor of an area? Wouldn't it be nice if you could stay with friends or family no matter where you went?
When eBay first started up, some people were nervous about buying from strangers. Specifically, the idea of sending someone money before they mail you a product was uncomfortable. But when you buy something off eBay, there are mechanisms designed to help you trust the transaction. Feedback is the main one. Before you purchase, you can look at the seller's feedback. If they've got a hundred positive transactions and no negative ones, and the reviews are things like "this seller was great to work with, fast shipping, item exactly as described," you can trust that your transaction will most likely go off without a hitch. On the other hand, if some of the feedback is negative, or even if some of the positive reviews include hints like "item arrived later than I thought, but basically fine," you can decide not to do business with that seller and look elsewhere. And if a seller has no feedback at all, it might be too much of a gamble.
Couchsurfing employs the eBay model of trust-building, which is critical for something as intimate as sleeping in a stranger's house.
Let's say we're driving to Phoenix from Florida. 2000 miles. It would be nice to break it up over several days. Options: stay in hotels or youth hostels, camp, stay with friends/family if possible, or couchsurf (I suppose sleeping in your car is also an option, but not one I'd take at this stage in my life).
I go to couchsurfing.org (where I already have established a profile) and enter the city that I'd like to find a couch. I briefly describe why I'm visiting and how many are in my group. Then, I get a list of possible hosts. I can read their profiles and feedback from other people who have hosted them or stayed with them. If I like what I read, I send them a request, which is basically a message I write that gets to them through the couchsurfing website. When they read it they respond (hopefully) with a yes, no or maybe. We can have a dialogue, back and forth, to "meet" each other, discuss all kinds of issues (arrival times, food, plans of what to do while there, sleeping arrangements, shared interests, etc.). By the time we actually arrive at their house, we feel like we already know them. Much of the time we spend with them, we'll most likely hang out, chat, share stories, and get to know each other better. By the time we leave, we have a new friend.
The challenges: Couchsurfing attracts people who like to travel and meet new people and experience other cultures, but it also attracts a lot of young people who, for lack of a better term, like to party. It's no surprise that there are a lot more 20-year-olds, less encumbered with the responsibilities of adult life (careers, family, paying bills, getting enough sleep), who are willing to host. So when reading through the profiles, I tend to skip these. Hosts who offer space for a family of five do exist, but they are fewer.
In my experience, couchsurfing folk can be broken down into three main categories of people, with lots of exceptions in between. Over-generalizing is never a good thing, so excuse the names of my categories, which, in keeping with the concept of over-generalization, are not entirely accurate:
THE PARTIERS
They're either college students or just a few years out of college. They are high on life and the novelty of adulthood. They almost always mention in their profile the substances/beverages they enjoy that add to their happy state, with a generous invitation to partake with their guests. Profile picture is often them in a club, holding a drink.
THE HIPPIES
They're any age, generally 20's to 70's. These folk are great, probably more similar to us than most would think, but the tricky thing with the hippies is that their definition of comfort can be...alternative. It's not uncommon to read things like "You can sleep wherever you want, but you might be sharing a room with three other guys, two dogs, a parrot, and my kombucha vats." I love the hippies because they're so open and accommodating (although I've never met any couchsurfer who seemed close-minded about anything). Nothing is weird. It's all good. Peace and love.
THE CULTURE JUNKIES
These are usually hardcore travelers. They list the countries they've visited and you have to scroll down to read them all. They host a ton of people. They know how to haggle in the markets of Marrakesh and discuss the intricacies of Scandinavian art. Their worldwide network of friends and acquaintances is breathtaking. They are, to steal from the Dos Equis marketing campaign, the most interesting people in the world. That hardcore couchsurfer at the start of this post that I said I'd stayed with? He fit this category.
THE PROFESSIONALS
Adults in the truest sense, they work a lot, and use couchsurfing as a means to meet new people amidst their busy lives. They often mention in their profile that they may not have a lot of time to show you around, but they'll try their best. They tend to be more likely to have kids.
THE DREAMIES
I call them the Dreamies because their situation sounds so amazing, its almost like a dream. "I have a 5 bedroom house near downtown. You can use four bedrooms, stay as long as you want, use my washer and dryer, borrow my car, and I'll cook gourmet meals for you. And if I'm not there, I'll leave the key under the mat." Wait, what?! Dreamies are rare, but there are more Dreamies hosting people than you might think.
Like I said, there are plenty of people who don't fit these categories, or are blends of more than one (personally, I think we're a blend of hippie, culture junkie, and professional). Runners-up categories include retirees, families, expats, and outdoors junkies.
In terms of our European summer, I'm trying to line up 11 nights of couchsurfing (not consecutive) in London (2), Liverpool (2), Scotland (3), Frankfurt vicinity (3), and Copenhagen (1). It's still quite early, so I haven't gotten any acceptances yet. The kind of people who use couchsurfing are also the kind of people who travel a lot themselves, so often a request gets turned down because they won't be home, or they'll give a maybe because they don't know what they'll be doing in 3 months. The key is patience, requesting to people who have a high percentage response rate, and putting out as many personalized requests as possible. We'll see what happens.
This will be our first couchsurfing abroad. I'm looking forward to it.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Friday, April 25, 2014
Why? How? When? Where?
Why?
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Mark Twain
As a family activity, we like to travel. We've taken road trips to North Carolina or across the country, extended trips to Costa Rica, and to a lesser extent, Europe. We've only been to Europe as a family once, in 2003, to Scotland for 3 weeks. Cristina has been to Germany a few times by herself or with Alex (once). Costa Rica is cheaper, both the flight and the living expenses.
Years ago, we began planning what kind of summer trip we should do when Sofia graduates. She's loved Greece since studying Greek mythology, so that seemed a natural choice. But after hosting Ida, our Danish student, the number of friends we'd like to visit in Europe hit critical mass and Europe was the logical choice.
“Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.” Edward Readicker-Henderson
How?
People who know us know we have raised our family on a public school teacher's salary. It hasn't been easy. We've gotten help from family at various times, we've had plenty of debt, we lost a house because we wanted to move closer to family during a time when houses in Phoenix were not selling, and we've even filed bankruptcy. So how in the world is a family like that going to Europe? The short answer is cheaply.
When we travel, we never stay in hotels or resorts. We only travel where we have friends or family who are willing to let us temporarily live with them.
We eat like the locals. As much as I'd love to try a new restaurant every day in a foreign country, our budget doesn't allow for that. So we shop in grocery stores and farmer's markets like the locals, and we cook our meals like we do at home.
We're not big shoppers, so we don't bring suitcases of new clothes and trinkets back with us. So the main expense is getting there and back.
I only claim 1 allowance on my W4, instead of 5, which means my employer withholds a lot more tax than they should. I know, I know, I'm giving the government an interest-free loan, since I'm going to get most of the withheld tax back in a refund. But I see it as a year-long savings plan that I can't dip into when the brakes need replacing or the kids have a field trip to pay for. The amount that I get back in a tax refund is significant enough to do something big with, like put braces on someone's teeth, or travel to Europe.
I also spend a lot of time (probably an obsessive amount of time) researching the best, cheapest flights. That involves running checks on various cities and dates. Over and over and over. I started this process in December (it's hard to find fares for flights more than 6 months ahead of time). On an almost daily basis, I checked fares, knowing I wouldn't have the money to purchase until mid-February (I file my taxes on the first day possible). My goal was to find airfare to Europe for $1000 per person. It was disheartening at times. At one point in January, I couldn't find anything cheaper than $1350. That doesn't sound like that big of a discrepancy, but remember that you have to multiply everything by 5 family members. So $350 extra becomes $1750 extra, which is a budget-buster. I knew I was getting about $5000 back in a tax refund.
Patience pays off. About a week after my tax refund was safely in my checking account, I found a flight from Orlando to Copenhagen close to the perfect dates, for $1014 per person. I bought.
When?
Some people justify the low pay teachers get with the fact that teachers have summers off. What people don't realize is that teachers don't get paid for those summers. So we have to take our already low pay and budget it to get us through the two months of summer when we don't get a paycheck. Many teachers work other jobs, tutor, or teach summer school to make some extra money. From 2006 to 2010, I worked summer school, 5 years in a row. Hell, in 2005, I worked at IKEA throughout the summer. A veteran teacher with a Master's degree selling sofas for $8 an hour. But I loved it.
The bonus, of course, is having that much time to do other things, if you can afford to not work the whole summer. This is when we've done most of our traveling. Those years when I taught summer school, the rest of the family usually started a trip without me and then I joined them after summer school was over. Not ideal, but sometimes a financial necessity.
Once Sofia got to high school, our summers were shortened by band camp. The first band camp is during the first week of summer break, and the second band camp is two weeks before school starts. So our 8-week window has been shortened to 5 weeks for the past four summers. With her graduating, and Alex still a year away from high school, we have before us a beautiful full summer, an eight week canvas on which to paint our European masterpiece. We decided to use as much of it as possible. Sofia has an exam after graduation (weird, I know, but that's the Cambridge program) and the cheapest flights were on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we purchased tickets flying out on Tuesday, June 17 and returning Tuesday, August 12. August 12 is two days into teacher pre-planning, but I'll use some leave days.
Where?
Getting to Europe turned out to be the easy part. Deciding what to do in Europe has been considerably harder. We have longtime friends in Germany and Scotland, so that seemed like the priority, the starting point. I've wanted to visit Denmark for years, and now with Ida in our lives and an invitation to stay with her family, that seemed like a no-brainer (plus the cheapest flights were to Copenhagen).
It seemed a shame to go all the way to Europe and not visit our Swiss friends who also invited us to stay with them, so that made its way into our plan.
The distances throughout Europe are short compared to traveling around the US, but I have news for those who think it's cheap to travel all over Europe by train. It ain't. I guess it's relatively cheap if you're a single student backpacking from country to country, but for a family of 5 with a necessary degree of luggage, trying to go to as many places as we are, trains are cost-prohibitive. Even as expensive as gas is in Europe ($8-$9 a gallon) the cheapest option is to rent cars and drive wherever we need to go.
The filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said, “The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.” I disagree. When you have a family of five trying to visit four countries on a shoestring budget, a precise itinerary is required for solvency and sanity. We're far from tourists, as we'll probably not stay a single night in a room that we pay for. And while our itinerary is precise, we have no plans for what we're doing at each place we visit. That can unfold as it occurs.
So the cars are hired. The flights are booked. Only thing left is the packing and the going. Here's the breakdown:
PART 1: DENMARK
June 17 - depart Orlando
June 18 - arrive Copenhagen, rent car, drive to Hals, Denmark to visit Marion and family (German friends on vacation in Denmark)
June 22 - drive to Vordingborg, Denmark to visit Trine and family (Danish-American friends)
June 25 - return car in Copenhagen, fly to London
PART 2: UNITED KINGDOM
June 25 - arrive in London, stay with Couchsurfing hosts (TBD)
June 27 - rent (sorry, hire) a car, drive to Liverpool, stay with Couchsurfing hosts (TBD)
June 29 - arrive in Edinburgh, Scotland, settle in with Steve and family
July 1 - tour Scotland while we still have a car
July 4 - return car in Edinburgh
July 10 - fly to Switzerland
PART 3: SWITZERLAND
July 10 - arrive in Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg (technically France, but who's counting). Rent a car in Freiburg, Germany, drive to Langenthal, Switzerland (Elisabeth and family)
July 16 - drive to Lenk im Simmental, Switzerland to visit Karin and family
July 21 - return car in Freiburg, rent another car in Freiburg (it's an insurance thing)
PART 4: GERMANY
July 21 - spend a few days in Frankfurt with Couchsurfing hosts
July 24 - spend a few days in Blomberg with Marion and family
July 27 - drive to Hamburg, stay at Martin's flat (one of our previous couchsurfing guests)
July 28 - return car in Hamburg, I fly to Copenhagen, rent car, drive back to Hamburg
July 29 - drive to Aarhus, visit with Ida and family
PART 5: DENMARK
July 29 - visit with Ida and family
August 8 - drive to Nykobing Falster, decompress at Trine's house
August 11 - return car in Copenhagen
August 12 - depart for Orlando
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Mark Twain
As a family activity, we like to travel. We've taken road trips to North Carolina or across the country, extended trips to Costa Rica, and to a lesser extent, Europe. We've only been to Europe as a family once, in 2003, to Scotland for 3 weeks. Cristina has been to Germany a few times by herself or with Alex (once). Costa Rica is cheaper, both the flight and the living expenses.
Years ago, we began planning what kind of summer trip we should do when Sofia graduates. She's loved Greece since studying Greek mythology, so that seemed a natural choice. But after hosting Ida, our Danish student, the number of friends we'd like to visit in Europe hit critical mass and Europe was the logical choice.
“Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.” Edward Readicker-Henderson
How?
People who know us know we have raised our family on a public school teacher's salary. It hasn't been easy. We've gotten help from family at various times, we've had plenty of debt, we lost a house because we wanted to move closer to family during a time when houses in Phoenix were not selling, and we've even filed bankruptcy. So how in the world is a family like that going to Europe? The short answer is cheaply.
When we travel, we never stay in hotels or resorts. We only travel where we have friends or family who are willing to let us temporarily live with them.
We eat like the locals. As much as I'd love to try a new restaurant every day in a foreign country, our budget doesn't allow for that. So we shop in grocery stores and farmer's markets like the locals, and we cook our meals like we do at home.
We're not big shoppers, so we don't bring suitcases of new clothes and trinkets back with us. So the main expense is getting there and back.
I only claim 1 allowance on my W4, instead of 5, which means my employer withholds a lot more tax than they should. I know, I know, I'm giving the government an interest-free loan, since I'm going to get most of the withheld tax back in a refund. But I see it as a year-long savings plan that I can't dip into when the brakes need replacing or the kids have a field trip to pay for. The amount that I get back in a tax refund is significant enough to do something big with, like put braces on someone's teeth, or travel to Europe.
I also spend a lot of time (probably an obsessive amount of time) researching the best, cheapest flights. That involves running checks on various cities and dates. Over and over and over. I started this process in December (it's hard to find fares for flights more than 6 months ahead of time). On an almost daily basis, I checked fares, knowing I wouldn't have the money to purchase until mid-February (I file my taxes on the first day possible). My goal was to find airfare to Europe for $1000 per person. It was disheartening at times. At one point in January, I couldn't find anything cheaper than $1350. That doesn't sound like that big of a discrepancy, but remember that you have to multiply everything by 5 family members. So $350 extra becomes $1750 extra, which is a budget-buster. I knew I was getting about $5000 back in a tax refund.
Patience pays off. About a week after my tax refund was safely in my checking account, I found a flight from Orlando to Copenhagen close to the perfect dates, for $1014 per person. I bought.
When?
Some people justify the low pay teachers get with the fact that teachers have summers off. What people don't realize is that teachers don't get paid for those summers. So we have to take our already low pay and budget it to get us through the two months of summer when we don't get a paycheck. Many teachers work other jobs, tutor, or teach summer school to make some extra money. From 2006 to 2010, I worked summer school, 5 years in a row. Hell, in 2005, I worked at IKEA throughout the summer. A veteran teacher with a Master's degree selling sofas for $8 an hour. But I loved it.
The bonus, of course, is having that much time to do other things, if you can afford to not work the whole summer. This is when we've done most of our traveling. Those years when I taught summer school, the rest of the family usually started a trip without me and then I joined them after summer school was over. Not ideal, but sometimes a financial necessity.
Once Sofia got to high school, our summers were shortened by band camp. The first band camp is during the first week of summer break, and the second band camp is two weeks before school starts. So our 8-week window has been shortened to 5 weeks for the past four summers. With her graduating, and Alex still a year away from high school, we have before us a beautiful full summer, an eight week canvas on which to paint our European masterpiece. We decided to use as much of it as possible. Sofia has an exam after graduation (weird, I know, but that's the Cambridge program) and the cheapest flights were on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, so we purchased tickets flying out on Tuesday, June 17 and returning Tuesday, August 12. August 12 is two days into teacher pre-planning, but I'll use some leave days.
Where?
Getting to Europe turned out to be the easy part. Deciding what to do in Europe has been considerably harder. We have longtime friends in Germany and Scotland, so that seemed like the priority, the starting point. I've wanted to visit Denmark for years, and now with Ida in our lives and an invitation to stay with her family, that seemed like a no-brainer (plus the cheapest flights were to Copenhagen).
It seemed a shame to go all the way to Europe and not visit our Swiss friends who also invited us to stay with them, so that made its way into our plan.
The distances throughout Europe are short compared to traveling around the US, but I have news for those who think it's cheap to travel all over Europe by train. It ain't. I guess it's relatively cheap if you're a single student backpacking from country to country, but for a family of 5 with a necessary degree of luggage, trying to go to as many places as we are, trains are cost-prohibitive. Even as expensive as gas is in Europe ($8-$9 a gallon) the cheapest option is to rent cars and drive wherever we need to go.
The filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said, “The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.” I disagree. When you have a family of five trying to visit four countries on a shoestring budget, a precise itinerary is required for solvency and sanity. We're far from tourists, as we'll probably not stay a single night in a room that we pay for. And while our itinerary is precise, we have no plans for what we're doing at each place we visit. That can unfold as it occurs.
So the cars are hired. The flights are booked. Only thing left is the packing and the going. Here's the breakdown:
PART 1: DENMARK
June 17 - depart Orlando
June 18 - arrive Copenhagen, rent car, drive to Hals, Denmark to visit Marion and family (German friends on vacation in Denmark)
June 22 - drive to Vordingborg, Denmark to visit Trine and family (Danish-American friends)
June 25 - return car in Copenhagen, fly to London
PART 2: UNITED KINGDOM
June 25 - arrive in London, stay with Couchsurfing hosts (TBD)
June 27 - rent (sorry, hire) a car, drive to Liverpool, stay with Couchsurfing hosts (TBD)
June 29 - arrive in Edinburgh, Scotland, settle in with Steve and family
July 1 - tour Scotland while we still have a car
July 4 - return car in Edinburgh
July 10 - fly to Switzerland
PART 3: SWITZERLAND
July 10 - arrive in Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg (technically France, but who's counting). Rent a car in Freiburg, Germany, drive to Langenthal, Switzerland (Elisabeth and family)
July 16 - drive to Lenk im Simmental, Switzerland to visit Karin and family
July 21 - return car in Freiburg, rent another car in Freiburg (it's an insurance thing)
PART 4: GERMANY
July 21 - spend a few days in Frankfurt with Couchsurfing hosts
July 24 - spend a few days in Blomberg with Marion and family
July 27 - drive to Hamburg, stay at Martin's flat (one of our previous couchsurfing guests)July 28 - return car in Hamburg, I fly to Copenhagen, rent car, drive back to Hamburg
July 29 - drive to Aarhus, visit with Ida and family
PART 5: DENMARK
July 29 - visit with Ida and family
August 8 - drive to Nykobing Falster, decompress at Trine's house
August 11 - return car in Copenhagen
August 12 - depart for Orlando
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Firing the Blog up Again
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been over a year since I last blogged.
And in the meantime, I've gotten 36 comments on old posts. Most of those were spam. So it goes.
I first blogged before there was something called a blog. I called it a travel journal. We spent about 7 weeks in Costa Rica in 1994 and I kept a journal every day.
Hold up. Back up eleven years.
Technically, my first travel journal was in November 1983, when I traveled to Israel with my mom and aunt. My grandmother worked at the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa, and we stayed with her for about 3 weeks and went on Baha'i Pilgrimage. Since I missed so much school, my teachers assembled a packet of stuff for me to complete. A daily travel journal was a requirement for my Language Arts teacher (probably...honestly, I don't remember who wanted what. I think my math teacher, Mr. Klauder, wanted me to research the Israeli currency and do a report for the class. Shekels.)
This sixth grade travel journal was a place to record the things I noticed, things I ate, places I went. I remember my dad criticized that I primarily logged the mundane day-to-day things ("This morning I ate corn flakes for breakfast") but the beauty of a journal or a blog or a diary, whatever you want to call it, is that you write it for yourself. You write the things that are meaningful to you. So, yes, I was on a religious pilgrimage in a foreign country, and there were undoubtedly an overwhelming number of cultural differences to take in, but for an 11-year-old, sometimes you want to log the corn flakes.
1994. Costa Rica. I'm not even sure I had a computer yet and laptops were still years away. I wrote my travel journal the old-fashioned way...long hand on a legal pad. Years later, I typed it into a Word document.
By 1998, when we returned to Costa Rica, my father-in-law had a computer. For the first time I typed my journals (usually while two-year-old Sofia was napping), and for the first time, I could email them to family members. Dial up, baby. I remember it was expensive to connect during the day, so we had to wait until evening to send emails. Ha.
My first travel blog was our 2006 trip to Costa Rica. The biggest advantages to blogging were that I could include photos (we bought our first digital camera in 2005) and people could read my blogs at their leisure, instead of waiting for an email.
I've blogged each trip abroad since then, although that's not as impressive as it sounds, since we've only traveled abroad one other time since then, to Costa Rica in 2009.
Until now. Until this summer.
We're going to Europe. Details to come.
And in the meantime, I've gotten 36 comments on old posts. Most of those were spam. So it goes.
I first blogged before there was something called a blog. I called it a travel journal. We spent about 7 weeks in Costa Rica in 1994 and I kept a journal every day.
Hold up. Back up eleven years.
Technically, my first travel journal was in November 1983, when I traveled to Israel with my mom and aunt. My grandmother worked at the Baha'i World Centre in Haifa, and we stayed with her for about 3 weeks and went on Baha'i Pilgrimage. Since I missed so much school, my teachers assembled a packet of stuff for me to complete. A daily travel journal was a requirement for my Language Arts teacher (probably...honestly, I don't remember who wanted what. I think my math teacher, Mr. Klauder, wanted me to research the Israeli currency and do a report for the class. Shekels.)
This sixth grade travel journal was a place to record the things I noticed, things I ate, places I went. I remember my dad criticized that I primarily logged the mundane day-to-day things ("This morning I ate corn flakes for breakfast") but the beauty of a journal or a blog or a diary, whatever you want to call it, is that you write it for yourself. You write the things that are meaningful to you. So, yes, I was on a religious pilgrimage in a foreign country, and there were undoubtedly an overwhelming number of cultural differences to take in, but for an 11-year-old, sometimes you want to log the corn flakes.
1994. Costa Rica. I'm not even sure I had a computer yet and laptops were still years away. I wrote my travel journal the old-fashioned way...long hand on a legal pad. Years later, I typed it into a Word document.
By 1998, when we returned to Costa Rica, my father-in-law had a computer. For the first time I typed my journals (usually while two-year-old Sofia was napping), and for the first time, I could email them to family members. Dial up, baby. I remember it was expensive to connect during the day, so we had to wait until evening to send emails. Ha.
My first travel blog was our 2006 trip to Costa Rica. The biggest advantages to blogging were that I could include photos (we bought our first digital camera in 2005) and people could read my blogs at their leisure, instead of waiting for an email.
I've blogged each trip abroad since then, although that's not as impressive as it sounds, since we've only traveled abroad one other time since then, to Costa Rica in 2009.
Until now. Until this summer.
We're going to Europe. Details to come.
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