The holy grail of travel for many? Meeting and truly integrating with locals and their culture. However, our interaction with most locals is contrived...we interact only with tour guides, hotel staff, waiters, shop owners. Sometimes we get lucky, like when we ride the subway, strike up a conversation and end up having a peek into the world of someone who lives where we travel. Sometimes we make our luck, like the filmmaker who befriended a Hungarian documentary filmmaker via message boards and got a personal tour and a homemade dinner when he arrived in Budapest from Los Angeles.

But one way families are integrating into local cultures, and saving money in the process, is through home exchange. Two favorite sites, homeexchange.com and homeforexchange.com, provide travelers the opportunity to browse homes in vacation destinations and pitch their own homes or apartments for a trade. Families can trade homes and cars and get a peek into the real lives of "natives." What's in their fridge? Their pantry? Photos on the wall share the memorable moments of their lives...a quinceanera, a local festival, a Bar Mitzvah. Their furniture and decor reveal their taste and often the design aesthetic of their homeland.

And what a difference it is to walk into someone's home after a long flight rather than check into a hotel. To have multiple bedrooms instead of putting the kids on cots in a cramped suite. To have a kitchen in which to prepare meals rather than eat at restaurants for every meal (a luxury at first, but exhausting and a wallet suck by day five). The friendliest exchanges even leave baskets of fruit or a full fridge for the incoming travelers.

A Santa Monica family who traded homes with a family from a small fishing village in southern France was thrilled to have an invitation from the family's relatives to their working farm, only a short walk from the exchange home. The relatives proudly served an array of cheeses, crackers and their local specialty: white wine infused with strawberry syrup. They gave the family fresh eggs and a tour of their 300-year-old stone farmhouse. They sat down with a detailed map and pointed out the "must see" areas that weren't listed in any guidebook.

Another family traded homes and cars with a family from Iceland. They met the neighbors, shopped at the nearby grocery store and were invited to swim at the local swimming pool—a daily Icelandic tradition that most tourists never experience.

Trading homes involves giving a great deal of trust to an unknown quantity: a strange family. Yes, they're coming into your nest while you are away. But you are coming into THEIR home. And the pride you feel in your space causes you to go into a flurry of home fixes you've been putting off for years, now that another family is coming to live in (and judge) your home.

Here to inspire you are some images of homes on the home exchange sites:

Belize

[image: homeexchange.com]

Sydney

[image: homeexchange.com]

Aspen

[image: homeexchange.com]

Canary Islands

[image: homeforexchange.com]

[main image: Versailles | homeexchange.com]