Discover house swapping with stories from our members

Yvonne and Mike are very active house swappers on HomeExchange. With 11 home exchanges and counting, Yvonne and Mike love traveling and discovering new places. They were kind enough to share their home exchange story in Rennes with us and we thought it would be a great idea to share it with our readers.

Perfect slow living without expectation.

We’d only had one tentative experience of an overnight swap with London, which went really smoothly. As my partner and I both decided we needed to get our adventurous spirit back, the unknown seemed like a good start.

So to fly with an airline we’d never heard of to a place we’d know nothing about, and swap houses with someone we’d never met seemed to fit our plan. I noticed our local airport London Southend had a new airline flying to quite a few destinations. Most of which we’d never been to and some of which we’d never heard of. We picked a flight at random which turned out to be Rennes, and matched it to a house owned by a lady with a nice smile. We clicked the contact button and an hour later everything was arranged.

We decided we’d do no research and take no map or information, only her address and contact details and a tiny cabin bag each. Couldn’t be easier.

The swap exceeded our expectations. Valérie and her son were the best guests we could have hoped for, friendly, communicative, efficient and just lovely. We would welcome them back again without hesitation… and our stay, well, we just loved both Rennes and the house itself.
The house was just charming, quirky, cozy and interesting and well…Perfect.

We walked around some streets we knew nothing about, strolled in the sunshine and sat in coffee shops, sketching and watching the world go by. Perfect slow living without expectation.

We only got to meet our fellow swapper at the airport when our planes crossed over and we had an amusing mime through the window about her cat (who normally hates people but fell in love with us) and the family of foxes she saw in our garden.

Her warm smiling face was the same as her profile, what a face can tell and what a good idea to go into the unknown.

This will be our new way of traveling… Next swap umm why not Budapest. We know nothing about it!

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