This is what several of our friends asked when we told them that we had asked complete strangers if we could come and visit them during our trip.

But my family and I have exchanged homes in the US four times, and as a matter of fact only one of these exchanges was a mutual exchange where our American home exchange partner came to Denmark and stayed in our house  – the other times we were simply offered the loan of people’s houses! You can see the houses we  borrowed here and later  you’ll be able to read more about them on the blog.

We have actually had even more offers of borrowing people’s homes in the US, but at times when we were not able to accept the offers. So when we started planning this summer’s trip to the US we immediately  decided to try to use the network that our membership of Homeexchange.com gives us access to. Over the years we have ourselves hosted various people – a Girl Scout leader from India participating in a conference in Denmark, two Chilean dentists touring Europe, exchange students from Finland and Alaska etc., and we think it’s fun to meet new people and hear about other countries and cultures. So we thought that there might be some Americans who would like to meet a little Danish culture. If they weren’t interested they could just click “No thanks” to our inquiry, and of course a few people did. Others wrote back kind messages to say that if they hadn’t been travelling themselves or had a house full of summer guests they would have been happy to have us!

So did anybody want a visit from you?

Yes, we are really happy to say that 5 couples in different places along our route has agreed not only to meet us, but to let us stay in their homes for a couple of days! We are really looking forward to meeting all of them. We land in Chicago on Saturday we will go directly to the house of Lisa, Michael and their two dogs, and I’ll be introducing you to them soon.