Vacations: There's No Place Like Someone Else's Home

Neighbors could hardly help but notice the strange things going on at the home of the Preble Stravers in Bethesda, Md. Two days after the Stravers left on vacation, another family moved into their house, drove about in their car and frolicked on the front lawn with the pets. Meanwhile, residents in Clearwater, Fla., were equally startled. Shortly after they saw Mrs. Jess Thacker (a widow) and her three children pile into her car with suitcases, another family arrived and made themselves at home.

The Stravers and Thackers were merely playing the newest vacation game—home swapping. To enjoy a change of scenery while keeping all the comforts—and savings—of home, they simply traded houses, even leaving each other the second car.

Fair Exchange. Today, hundreds of families who have never met are throw ing their doors open to one another, allowing for long vacations that resort-hotel expenses would place beyond their means. Most of them discover each other through recently created house-swapping clubs such as the Vacation Exchange Club in Manhattan, and the Vacation Home Exchange in Old Greenwich, Conn. For $5, members of the Vacation Exchange Club can place a classified ad in the club's international directory, describing their homes as well as indicating where and when they would like to vacation. Interested subscribers write back, and after as many as ten letters have passed back and forth, an agreement is reached. For prices ranging from $25 to $75, the club in Old Greenwich will locate houses, check references, inspect the neighborhood and close the deal.

Surprisingly, few swappers ever feel swindled. Because location and savings are the principal considerations, a twobedroom flat in midtown Chicago might be considered fair exchange for a 30-room chateau in France. And with their own houses being held as collateral, few vacationers are apt to tear their temporary homes apart. Explains Mrs. Jeannette Spensley, who traded her six-room Albuquerque home for three rooms in Torrance, Calif.: "There's a kind of adventurous spirit among those of us doing this. You put your trust in people, and they in you. It's the golden rule taking potluck, except you toss your house around the pot."

Shooing Sheep. In the search for the right vacation home, people occasionally work out triple exchanges. A few summers ago, a farmer from Republic, Ohio, wanted to take his family to Detroit to race a high-stepping trotting horse. But the exchange house the agency had listed belonged to a Detroit schoolteacher who wanted to spend his vacation in New York. The impasse was finally breached by a Manhattan professor who wanted some country air. The Detroit schoolteacher took over the professor's Manhattan flat; the farmer got the schoolteacher's house outside Detroit; and the professor and his family spent their summer on the Ohio farm, their only obligation being to shoo an occasional sheep out of the alfalfa field.