Feels like home

My definition of home follows the English proverb “Home is where you hang your hat”. Home is where I live. Home is where my I have my stuff. Home is where I sleep at night. And when I am traveling, home is a vacation rental that I have rented for a week or two.

I am writing this while staying at a vacation rental in France, going back next week to a house that we have rented for a year in England, while our house in Colorado is rented out to help finance this European adventure. Which of these is home? Right now it is this house in Normandy.

What makes a vacation rental feel like home?

Vacation rentals come in all shapes and sizes, from basic to luxury, but you know as soon as you walk in if it is going to feel like home.

• Someone or something is there to greet me. It is nice to be welcomed by the owner or local representative but we have stayed in places where the key was left under a flowerpot and they still felt welcoming. Tea was set up on the counter or there was a note from the owner or fresh flowers in a vase – something that let me know the house was ready for me.
• A house book helps me understand how things work. I don’t want to spend my time trying to find the owner to ask about garbage, recycling or how the stove works. I want it all written down so I can get the information when I need it. A good house book shows me that the owner cares about their house and wants me to be comfortable.
• Good local information so I can find my way around. Most likely I have never been to the area before. If the owner gives me some insider information – the best places to shop, a few good local restaurants, the best café – that makes me feel like a local.
• The furniture was chosen with the traveler in mind. No orange couch purchased decades ago for the owner’s house and put in the vacation rental when they can no longer stand looking at it.
• The fridge is clean. When we arrived at our vacation rental in England last summer, the fridge was full of half eaten and expired food. Opened bottles of alcohol lined the counter. Dog-chewed shoes were stuffed under the couch. I felt like an intruder in someone else’s house and never felt at home.
• Nice towels. Fluffy from a tumble dryer or stiff from line drying, I don’t care – what is important to me is a nice set of towels left for me.
• There is room for me. I am not house-sitting, I am not staying with a friend – I am renting this place to be my home for a short time. I want room to spread out, to use the house the way I like to live. I don’t want a house bursting at the seams with the owner’s knick-knacks or, even worse, antiques that I worry about damaging. I want room for my things, so I can unpack and settle in.

I appreciate the time vacation rental owners take to set up these homes for travelers, to think about what we need for cooking, to make spaces for us, to hang pictures you know we will enjoy. I would like to thank vacation rental owners who make a home for me.

And to the vacation rental owner who takes the orange couch that they never could stand and dumps it into their vacation rental, I would like to say “Hey, that is my home you are decorating!”

My current home, this vacation rental in Normandy, is lovely. I feel comfortable and at home. My maps and books are spread out on the coffee table. My food is on the shelves in the kitchen. My clothes hang in the closets. This is my home right now and it feels like home to me.

At home away from home in Hungary

Last year my wife and I decided that we wanted more than just a holiday.  We wanted to really experience a place at a deeper level than we normally do as sightseeing tourists.  So we packed the car and headed across the continent in a three-month trip to Hungary.

The journey across Central Europe from the UK was itself a great experience, but what we were really looking forward to was making ourselves at home in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest.

When we reached Budapest after 1000 miles of driving, we certainly did not feel at home as we tried to navigate the busy city streets with its dense traffic, tram tracks, one-way systems and complex junctions.  Nor did we feel much better when after several stressful hours we found our accommodation on what looked like a slightly dubious back street.  However, a couple of months later when it was time to start packing up and head back home again, we found ourselves feeling unsure about where home really was, since Budapest had become out home away from home.

So how did a place that felt so foreign and stressful when we first arrived come to feel like home?

1. Local Knowledge

There is only so much that you can learn from guidebooks and the best guides are normally the people with local knowledge.  However, we weren’t looking for a tour guide of the landmarks and historical sites at all.  We wanted to be the people with the local knowledge – to get a feel for how the local people really live.

The best way to do this was to simply do what we would do if we moved to a new town in the UK.  We stayed in a residential area away from the main tourist areas and explored the city extensively on foot and by bicycle, aware of the fact that the lives of real people don’t always take place in the big city squares, but the small lanes where you find your local grocery stores, markets, cafes and parks.

2. Home Cooking

Surely few things make you feel more at home than good home cooking.  We were never going to feel at home for this length of time staying in a hotel and eating out in restaurants every day (nor could we afford to do so).  We wanted to get up in the morning at breakfast in our own kitchen, and then be able to come home at night and cook our own meals, which is why we rented a furnished apartment with a fully equipped kitchen.  This not only gave a sense of normality by being able to have meals at home whenever we wanted to, but it also meant shopping for groceries, and if I dare say it, cleaning up after ourselves, which in a strange way gave us a sense of ownership and made us feel that the apartment was our own.

3. Favourite Hangouts

Wherever we live, we always find special places that we enjoy going and spending time, whether it’s a place to go shopping, a cafe, a place to go for walks or whatever.  Get to know a place well enough and you’ll find some favourite places where you regularly like to spend time.  In our case we love to go for walks by the river, have picnics at Normafa on top of the Buda Hills and enjoy the tasty but extremely unhealthy food across the road from our apartment at Fanyuvo cafe, with its rustic log cabin interior.

4. Take Something with You

Whatever it might be, everyone has a few possessions that they always associate with home.  You can’t take everything with you, but sometimes it’s nice to take a few special things.  In our case, the most significant thing we brought with us was in fact our car, which as well as being a familiar item from home, actually made us feel as that if we had driven there, then we couldn’t be very far from home.  We also brought along our cuddly orang-utan Koyah, so we always had a friendly face to keep us company wherever we went.

5. People

I’ve always believed that home is not where the heart is, what with whom the heart is.  Basically, feeling at home is in many ways more about people than about place.  The most important thing of course was that my wife and I were together, but we also had friends and family visit while we were there.  It’s funny how little you can see people who live just a short drive away, but when you travel to another country you suddenly have people queuing up to come and visit you.

On top of that, the attitude of the local people is very important.  We found Hungarians to be extremely welcoming, and there was not one occasion when we were made to feel uncomfortable or excluded.  The language barrier in Hungary does make it difficult to get to know people, but just seeing familiar faces around the local area and in shops and cafes where we regularly went was very important, especially those people who even though you can’t speak their language, recognize you and give you a smile whenever they see you.

If we’d stayed longer then learning the language would certainly have been the final ingredient to feeling truly at home away from home in Hungary, but that will have to leave that the next time.

The author, Len Cordiner, CEO of whl.travel, discusses the problem of the certification of accommodations and tours as “eco-friendly”, a matter that I will leave aside here. But the interesting point he makes is that he believes that something did not quite work as planned, as many people tend to equate

green vacation with doing it tough – hard beds and tasteless food. Green or sustainable holidays were perceived as something only tree huggers would do, not at all fun or enjoyable.

For this reason, he says, we need a new thinking and his proposal is to engage

“travellers with a coherent and inviting new vision of what ‘eco’ (now perhaps better known as responsible or sustainable or even slow) tourism is really about.

This done, travellers will need to be engaged in driving change throughout the supply chain by giving feedback to other travellers, much in the same way they are prompting evolution in the hotel industry (including new brands) with their feedback on services. I imagine a slow tourism version of Trip Advisor being what it looks like.”

I read this and I thought: “this is not a new way of thinking, this is what we have been doing for a while”. And indeed Slow Tourism is a well-established reality, as the lively community participating in the Slow Travel Forum and contributing to the site evidences clearly.

There are many professionals in Italy that adhere to the slow travel philosophy, and abroad as well (think about the Slow Travel Tours). We organizied a Get Together in Italy both last year (we hosted the first Italian Slow Travel Inn Keepers in our village in 2008) and this year Megan of Bella Vita Italia organized the get-together in Lerici, Liguria.

Nothing new about using travellers’ feedback either: Slow Travel has been posting slow travellers’ reviews for years.

So what’s new then? Giulia rightly pointed out that Mr. Cordiner brings into the mix the idea of ecotourism and sustainability. He actually writes “even slow“, as if “slow travel” was one of the possible ways to make tourism sustainable. I do agree on this: slow travel may and should indeed be sustainable.

People from different areas of expertise though should not work separately to defining the new paradigms of tourism research and practice. Tourists, practitioners and researchers should all work together.

I started wondering about why, in a time in which travelling slow seems to be getting quite popular (at least according to this article), I still felt that there is more to it than just pace and greenness…

I have been talking about this with 4 dear friends, with whom I feel I have much in common both from a human and professional point of view and with whom I have often discussed tourism-related matters. We share some fundamental views about both travelling and welcoming people: one is Giulia of La Locanda della Valle Nuova, near Urbino in Le Marche, and the others are Letizia of La Madonna del Piatto, near Assisi in Umbria, Diana of Baur B&B, near Acqui Terme in Piedmont, and Megan of La Bella Vita Italia, in Lerici in Liguria.

The article also reminded me of David Peat‘s work on Gentle Action (he’s a physicist and philosopher…, but that’s not the point, if you are curious to see what he’s up to in his small hilltop hamlet in Tuscany you can check the site of the cultural center he has created). He has similar ideas on social and economic issues. He says something important, I believe. He speaks of

“actions which begin from within the system in question and emerge in creative ways.. These may range from projects on an international scale to a simple action by an individual. Such actions generally flow from what Peat has termed “creative suspension” – that temporary pause when we listen and learn what the system has to teach us before taking action”.

This got me thinking, and I realized that this is exactly what defines my attitude to travel and tourism and this is what I think I share with Giulia, Letizia, Diana and Megan.

We believe in travelling slow, so that we can properly enjoy what is local, and actually learn from it. We do all we can to offer our guests this very same experience when we are the hosts rather than the travellers: we believe in offering a true and authentic local experience, in allowing people to see Italy and our life as it really is by helping them to take advantage of what the areas in which we are located has to offer.

I believe in promoting a type of travel experience which does not change the area in which I operate, but rather touches the people who come here. I don’t want to exploit, but to enrich, both my homeland and the travelers who come see it.

I have understood that I believe not only in Slow Travel and Slow Tourism, but in a true Gentle Travel, in Gentle Tourism and by this I mean a type of tourism experience which is sustainable, which promotes what’s truly local, the way it is, without adjusting it to please the traveler, and which for this reason allows him or her to truly experience everyday life in its most authentic aspects.

And at the same time it allows the locals to be able to show what they have to offer. This is why I have contacted the local wineries to organize wine tastings rather than sending people to a more famous  area farther away. I have found local farmers who can show their olive groves, or take people out for a ride with their horses. I have found a local bike shop whose owners are happy to take people out for a bike tour. I have found local people willing to teach family cooking. I invite people to shop at the local stores, so that they can truly experience the local way of life. I try to show what the system has to give.

I believe that travellers should get in contact with the local communities, enrich them and learn from them, looking at them with an open mind.

I hope I’ll be able to promote this idea by helping people to travel in a gentle way to Tuscany and at the same time by helping locals to bring out all the amazing things that I know for a fact this area has to offer.

I really hope I’ll be able to help my area speak for itself and help people to listen to it.