OK, I admit it. I was getting a little nervous. After I hadn’t heard from our home exchange partner in over a month, a short note arrived last Saturday with the question what day we would arrive. Relief! That was the kind of news I had been waiting for.

Our email correspondence had been sporadic since we had both agreed to a non-simultaneous home exchange a few months ago; however, a few important details of our swap puzzle were still missing. Like exchanging addresses and keys!

I mailed back right away, asking for these details. No answer. I knew our partner was very heavily engaged at work and he was about to head out on an overseas business trip. Also, he had never done a home exchange before. In all of my correspondence with him, I had gained the impression of a reliable and trustworthy person. Things would work out, I just knew.

But today, just 9 days before our trip I decided to call for action. Where to start without even having a phone number? Do you sometimes type in the name of a last friend on Google to find out what happened to him? That’s what I did with his name and bingo!

It wasn’t easy to get connected directly with him over the phone. First of all, I called from out of country and secondly, I do not speak the native language well at all. Once I got through to his office staff, they would not give me his mobile number. Of course not! But within a few hours my phone was ringing and my home exchange partner was on the line. It took but a few minutes to put together the final pieces of the missing home exchange puzzle.

Once again, like so many times before when I had organized a home exchange, my intuition had not misled me. I knew I could trust this stranger.