Calabogie Home Exchange

When we registered on the home exchange site two years ago, we were allotted guest points that we could use to stay somewhere without doing an exchange. Ray and I could have accumulated extra guest points by letting people stay in our home when we were away, but we haven’t chosen to do that. The guest point option works best for people who have second homes or cottages on the site (that are often cross-listed on airbnb).

That was the case with the chalet we stayed at for a few nights last week with long-time friends Tim and Pamela. It rents for $500 a night on Airbnb, but we stayed for free using our points.

In the two years we’ve been home exchange members we’ve had five stays:

• 2 nights in the Thousand Islands at a beautiful waterfront home with hot tub
• 5 nights at a downtown condo in Montreal
• 2 weeks near Westport, in a house overlooking a beaver pond (pet sit)
• 4 nights at a house with a hot tub along Ray’s cycle route (guest point stay)
• 3 nights at a chalet in Calabogie (guest point stay)

That’s 28 nights of accommodation for an annual membership fee of less than $200, so it’s definitely been worth it for us. Juno came with us on four of those stays, so that’s another major benefit of this travel option.

If you’ve ever considered home exchanges, here are a few caveats:

• You have to be comfortable with strangers staying in your home when you’re not there (many people aren’t).
• Not all hosts accept guest points, and many who do charge a cleaning fee.
• You have to be pretty flexible in terms of where and when you want to travel – we tried to arrange a home exchange for our trip to Maine last year but our dates were already set so we couldn’t get it to work.
• It definitely helps to live somewhere people want to visit and/or to have a really nice home – we benefit from the fact that there aren’t many homes listed in nearby Prince Edward County, which is a popular tourist destination.
• You have to be realistic in your expectations – I see people who live in the suburbs of a town outside Toronto, for example, looking for exchanges in southern Europe in February or March. Not likely to happen. We’ve only received a few requests for exchanges from outside Canada. About 95% of the requests we get are from Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City. And even they don’t want to come here in the winter. Exceptions would be popular ski destinations like Whistler or Tremblant.

Calabogie chalet

We’ve been enjoying winter getaways with Tim and Pamela since our boys were little. Those ‘boys’ are now off climbing mountains and fighting fires, both literally and figuratively, so we carry on without them.

Our chalet was just a few minutes from Calabogie Peaks ski resort and offered access to a network of cross-country ski trails right outside the door, but the conditions weren’t ideal for either of those activities. We had snow, but it was covered in an icy crust. It was mild and sunny though so we still got to enjoy the great outdoors.

Our friends Anne and Sanjay also live in Calabogie, so we spent a couple of evenings socializing with Sanjay (Anne was away).

We spent hours the first day exploring the trails.

Juno had a ball digging through the snow in pursuit of whatever it was she could hear or smell under there.

On day 2 we climbed up to Eagle’s Nest Lookout. That’s Ray, somewhat camouflaged on the rock.

After our mini-vacay, we drove to Ottawa and stopped in to see our former neighbour Loris. Since we met Loris when she was in her early 70s, she’s always been on the go – traveling to India to volunteer in Mother Teresa’s orphanage, caring for Ottawa’s homeless population, and doing activist work with the Raging Grannies – to name just a few. At 97, she still keeps as busy as her mobility allows her to, but she described old age as a ‘series of losses’ and I’ve been thinking about that a lot since she said it. You lose family members, friends, independence, health, mobility, hearing, eyesight, memory…as my dad used to say, getting old isn’t for sissies.

Juno got plenty of treats from Loris

Over the years we’ve met all six of Loris’s daughters, so it was nice to also catch up with her daughter Isla and son-in-law Peter who served us a lovely lunch in Loris’s suite.

Then it was back to the old neighbourhood where we spent a wonderful afternoon and evening catching up with the Ottawa gang – walking, hot tubbing, eating, drinking and listening to tunes.

We celebrated Ray and Sue’s February birthdays with a cake that Sue later declared was her best birthday cake EVER. Tasty as it was, it was the…presentation… that made it so memorable. We laughed so hard our sides hurt and tears rolled down our cheeks. I won’t go into the details to avoid embarrassing anyone, but I will say that years from now, when we’re in our 70s and 80s and the gang is all sitting around a table reminiscing, someone will say “Hey, remember the cake fire?” and we’ll all laugh again at the memory of it. (No one was injured in the making of this hilarity.)

On our way back to Brighton we stopped to see Nick, who treated us to lunch at a lovely restaurant while his housemate Marley looked after Juno.

We arrived back in Brighton in time for a Superbowl get-together with Bill & Lorrie and Rick & Josee, which doubled as another birthday celebration for Ray, though the cake presentation was not nearly as dramatic.

The next day, all three of us – even Juno, who’s an extraverted social butterfly – were exhausted and ‘peopled out’, as Nick used to say. We laid low for a couple of days to recover.

60 at 60 list:

1. January challenge: 30 days of Flow Yoga – on day 24 of 30
2. Memory challenge: Identify all 195 countries in the world on a map (using Seterra app) 
3. Sunbathe on the au naturel island
4. Try pickleball
5. Climb a waterfall
6. February challenge: study Portuguese (use Duolingo daily for six weeks) – 24-day streak so far!
7. Initiate coffee with someone you don’t know
8. Calabogie mini-vacay with Tim & Pamela