Sally Ross is a British journalist, blogger, travel enthusiast, and member of HomeExchange. Recently, she secured 27 nights of accommodation through the platform, allowing her to explore Norway and Sweden on a memorable road trip. In this article, she shares her experience and tips.
I love a road trip. I love the feeling of having weeks of travel ahead of me and getting the opportunity to explore a whole country or region. But they can be a lot of work – and taking longer trips can easily become very expensive.
The good news is that home exchanging makes road trips easier – and more affordable – than you might think. I’ve just got home from a month-long road trip
around Norway and Sweden, based on a series of home exchanges.
If you’re thinking about a similar road trip or want to explore how home exchange
could make your next road trip easier, here are some things I learned along the way.
Plan your start and end points first
The great thing about exchanging is that it’s so flexible, so the only real fixed points on your travels are where you’ll start, and where you’ll end up!
Often a road trip will be a loop but in this instance taking a hire car between Norway and Sweden is very expensive, so I made the choice to rent a car in Norway for the first two weeks of my trip, then take a train to Sweden and hire a car for the second two weeks. So my start and end points became Bergen and Stockholm.
Luckily, both places had lots of amazing exchange properties available, and I was
able to find exchange homes for GuestPoints that would be comfortable and provide easy access to the city center.
Decide on any must-see destinations
Having spent some time researching on Instagram, I had a couple of places that I
definitely wanted to visit.
Geirangerfjord was at the top of my bucket list. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site that has spectacular scenery, and it seemed like a crime to go to the fjords without stopping here! I also really wanted to visit Alesund on the coast, and to explore the Viking museum in Oslo.
I used Google Maps to plot these points on a map, along with my start and end
points – this helped me to understand roughly what my travel route might look like.
From here, I could map out a rough itinerary, starting from Bergen, heading up the coast as far as Alesund, before coming back down towards Bergen and heading East to Oslo, then Stockholm.
Start contacting potential hosts!
I used the Google Maps image as a very rough guide, using Home Exchange’s
location search to look at homes on the map that were approximately on the route.
You have to be flexible at this stage and remember that the beauty of home
exchange is finding amazing new adventures! Definitely look at places that take you a little off the main highways and routes, or a little out of what you thought was the ‘best’ way.
For example, I didn’t find an exchange in Alesund, but it worked out perfectly,
because I went a couple of hours North and stayed in an amazing waterfront cabin with its own sauna and boat house. And I still got to see Alesund on my way back South.
Making it all fit
Building a road trip itinerary this way is like a jigsaw puzzle. Putting together the
edges (your start and end point) is pretty easy, but you might need to shuffle around the other pieces to make them fit.
I explained to all the potential hosts that I was planning a road trip, and my exact
dates might vary by a few days depending on where I found myself before or after
their location. I found many people were really flexible, and I added and removed a
few days here and there to get everything to fit.
In the end HomeExchange helped me to find 27 nights’ accommodation in six different homes during my trip. I only needed to pay for a hotel in Oslo for one night while I was travelling from Norway to Sweden!
The perfect road trip
The absolute best thing about an exchange-based road trip is getting to really
discover a place thanks to your hosts’ expert recommendations.
Without my hosts, I’d never have known about the amazing waterfall near Bergen that you can walk behind, or the secret bench hidden among the trees above Ulsteinveik where you can watch the sunset.
When my fabulous host in Aukra learned I was going to drive the famous Atlantic
Ocean Road, he directed me to Bjartmars, a waterfront fish restaurant located just a few minutes off the main road. He also told me about the Midsund Steps – a series of stone steps laid by sherpas up the mountains around Midsund. I can promise you that your legs won’t thank you the next morning, but the views are out of this world!
In Sweden, my hosts took me kayaking on the local river, before inviting me to join
them for a homemade meal of meatballs and rhubarb pie. I also have Pia and Jesper to thank for telling me about the local restaurant that offers an all-you-can-eat cheese buffet!
At every stage of the journey, I got to visit the places that locals go, finding the best
walks, the best restaurants, the best experiences. It’s truly a magical way to discover a new country, and exchanging means your next road trip could be easier and more affordable than you think!
