USD Magazine Spring 2010

HomeAway Trading spaces pays off in family’s adventure of a lifetime by Kelly Knuf ken

Trading spac

photog r aphy by T im Man toani

Shelley Miller is downplaying the view. This isn’t easy. When you enter her Point Loma home, the gor- geous sight of downtown San Diego and the Coronado Bridge beckoning from her living room window immediately draws you in. “I want you to know that you don’t have to have a view to do this,” she says. Indeed, her family of four didn’t even live in this showstopper of a house when they put their normal life on hold for five months in 2000 to embark on a home exchange vacation that would take them to six countries over five months. It turned out to be the trip of a lifetime. Miller ‘03 (MSEL) has become an ambassador of sorts for home exchange, the practice of trading homes with people all over the world. She opens the guidebook, asks where you’d like to go. She tells you how, after a total of eight such trips, they’ve never returned home to find so much as a broken glass. She tells you having faith in people has let her family have amazing travel experiences, the kind you just can’t get in a hotel. But first things first. It’s not about the house. The Millers’ home is listed i the HomeLink International guide- book like this: “Lovely, casual home on Point Loma, quiet family area near many attractions.” There are any number of reasons someone may be looking for a home exchange vacation. For example, the family from Italy that they first swapped houses with, near the town Miller’s grandmoth- er hailed from, had a brother in San Diego. And for their part, on the first leg of the family’s “European Adventure” (as Miller dubbed it in her carefuly assembled itiner- ary), they were staying in a Tudor home in England built in 1485. Quite a contrast to say, San Diego, which was established as a city in 1850. At age 8, daughter Michele was shy and introverted. But on that first misty morning in England, she got up before her mom, put on

rainboots that the other family kept by the door, donned a jacket over her pajamas, and went outside to feed the geese. “I was sur- prised and thrilled,” Miller recalls. “At that time, she was full of fear at home. She had difficulty sleeping through the night, evil things lurked outside and they were going to come in and hurt us. The fact that she got up on her own while we were all asleep was out- side her comfort zone, but she did it.” Miller smiles at the power of her memory. “We were privately jubilant. We took these kids out of their neighborhood world and transplanted them to these many countries. And especially with someone like Michele, who was so fearful, well, some might have thought travel was the wrong move. But in fact, in that very first country we realized that this was the right move.” The extended trip allowed Miller and her husband to see new facets of both her children. Unlike Michele, her son Dillon was out- going and relatively fearless, but one day in England, Miller found out just how extroverted he really was. “We were touring King Henry the VIII’s home, Hampton Court Palace, which has the most famous maze in the world,” she recalls “Across a grass courtyard, I spotted a juggler.” It turned out to be her 12-year-old son, his father’s baseball cap serving as a repository for coins and pound notes from the appreciative crowd surrounding him. “The kids learned about themselves during this trip, and Stan and I got to watch them as they opened up to who they are, as they came into their own.” It was growth experiences like that — seeing what her children were capable of and interacting with them absent the family’s everyday routine — that sealed the trip in Miller’s memory. You gotta have faith. “A lot of people can’t get past the fact that we don’t know these people we trade houses with.” But for Miller, there are ways of getting to know their partners in this adventure without meeting them in person.

HomeAway Trading spaces pays off in family’s adventure of a lifetime by Kelly Knuf ken

SPRING 2010 29