Yes, way back in the Dark Ages of 1962, my family were Pioneers. It was Seattle, and a World’s Fair was coming in June. My parents looked around, guessed at how crowded the city would be with tourists, and decided that we didn’t want to be here for the deluge of visitors. My mother had a bright idea to get us out of the city for June. She had a cousin who just happened to be the Managing Editor of the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper. She wrote him a letter (in those dark days before computers and email), asking him if he might be able to find a family in Honolulu who wanted to exchange houses with us for the month of June. They would come to Seattle, visit the Fair or other activities, and have full use of our new house and car during their stay. And we would go to Honolulu, live in their house, and have use of their car for June.

So Cousin put an ad in his newspaper, and we waited to see if there would be results. It turned out that he did find a family who was willing to exchange houses with us, and we got their address and phone number so Mom could call and talk to them. The family in question had relatives in Vancouver BC, which is only a three-hour drive from Seattle, and would be thrilled to swap homes. So in the first week of June, Dad, Mom, Sister,(age 11) and I (age 13) got on the plane and flew to Hawaii. We would meet my cousin Howard there, too.

Once we arrived, picked up Howard, and made it out to the house, we immediately discovered that we had really gotten the better of the deal. The house was in the ritzy Kahala neighborhood near Diamond Head crater, and had a Plumeria tree in the well-manicured front yard. When we went inside, we found the real deal-maker: the house had a swimming pool!! We had never ever been in a house with a pool, and we spent hours there, when we weren’t driving around the island or at Waikiki Beach swimming. The house had a kitchen with a counter facing the pool, so we could eat our meals poolside. Sister and I made our own leis from the plumeria flowers in front, and splashed around in the pool. Howard was a bit older, and he tended to get rowdy in the pool, so Mom had her hands full.

I remember the first day we went to the world-famous Waikiki Beach. It did have the vaunted white sands, but I have an unpleasant memory of how dirty it was, with cigarette butts and other garbage all over the sand. You had to be very careful not to step in something awful when walking there. The summer months are the off-season in Hawaii, so things weren’t too crowded. The water was nice and warm, and we all came home with all-over suntans. We took one long day trip in the Ford Falcon car that the family had left us, driving along the perimeter of the island. I don’t remember too much about the trip, but there were some cliffs with a nice view of the ocean. Another memory I have was before dinner, Mom put out the silverware for me to set the table. When I went to pick up the utensils, what should come out, but a tiny green lizard! He startled me, but I wasn’t afraid of it. He just scurried away, and we lost him.

We really had a great time in Hawaii, and were not happy to return home. But it did turn out that we had really started something. Mom’s cousin at the Advertiser was very happy at how our home-exchange had gone, and he ran with the idea. He had an article in the paper later, describing what we had done, and that was the beginning of a more-organized Home-Exchange movement. The idea thrived, and now there are many companies/web sites where families and individuals can hook up with others around the world, not just in Hawaii, to exchange homes for limited times. Too bad Mom and Cousin didn’t copyright the idea! We could have gotten rich off of it!

Funny, when we got back to Seattle it turned out that we weren’t the only residents who left town to avoid the crowds. The Fair was NOT mobbed, and we did go a few times before it closed. It was another example of people making the same assumptions, and stopping the crowds that they feared, by NOT going! The family we exchanged with liked our house, and everyone went away very happy. It was fun being a Pioneer, though we didn’t know it at the time. We just had a fun vacation.