Hospitality Helps $5 Go a Long Way

Have you ever dreamed of travel without the usual huge cash outlay for lodging? Or wished that your sightseeing extended to real-life living at the local level?

My wife and I found the best of both these worlds this summer on a nine-day tour of hospitality stays in the Pacific Northwest.

With hardly more preparation than a few phone calls, we set out on a trip that quickly uncovered the things that most travelers dream of: new friends, real hospitality, virtually free lodging and all the excitement of spontaneous get-up-and-go travel.

Our first night out, we stayed in Sacramento in a rambling new Tudor-style home set back on wooded grounds with a stream nearby. As Lee Ann, the owner, had insisted during our telephone conversation: “It’s a big house, plenty of room. Come right on.” Her husband built the house himself, she later told us over coffee at her kitchen table, where we talked until late the night we arrived.

Our hostess had said she was sleeping in the next morning. So before letting ourselves out at 6:30, we left a note that said: “Thank you. On to Oregon.” On the kitchen table alongside the note, we left $10, our lodging fee for the night. No checkout, no bellboys, no tips, no tax.

We threw a couple of bags into the car and took off up Interstate 5 through the center of Northern California.

Our own Oregon trail had begun at home in Fresno a few days earlier, when we scanned hospitality club directories for members along our projected itinerary. With those homes identified, we made a few calls to arrange lodging and were off on our Lewis and Clark adventure, 1990s-style.

If my mention of “hospitality stays” causes confusion, it’s because many people aren’t familiar with this mode of travel.

A hospitality stay is a night’s lodging, or more, with someone who is usually a member of a hospitality club and has agreed to provide hospitality to other club members traveling through his or her area.

You offer a spare room or bed to travelers for a short stay when they come to your city. In exchange, they or other members of the network will usually do the same for you when you visit their town.

Hospitality stays are made-to-order for those travelers who like the pleasures of meeting people and making new friends. As a rule, it involves little or no exchange of money. The $10 we paid Lee Ann is the nightly lodging fee (for two) required of members who belong to the INNterlodging Co-op club.

The easiest way to exchange hospitality is to join one of the clubs and get your name into its directory. Or, better still, join several clubs.

In this regard, it helps if you know something about each club’s profile. How many members does the club have? Where is the membership located? Some clubs even list the interests and hobbies of their membership. The INNterlodging club directory, for example, shows strong listings for the Pacific Northwest.

Our second night was scheduled with Tom and Rosemary in Medford, Ore. Blame it on red-dotted road maps with indecipherable mileage or whatever, but we arrived too early to stop for the night. Tom, a retired photographer, gave us a rain check and we pushed on to get closer to Portland.

The change of schedule resulted in a motel stay in Eugene, Ore., where I had wanted to meet a consultant at the University of Oregon anyway. Due to an abundance of “No Vacancy” signs and a scarcity of nonsmoking rooms, we spent this off night in a tobacco-cured $45 room. I regretted missing our hospitality stay-over in Medford.

In the morning, we headed out for St. Helens, half an hour north of Portland. There the Columbia River begins its final 50-mile run to the Pacific at Astoria. We had arranged our St. Helens hospitality stay with Esther.

Esther--crisp, efficient and distinctly German--met us at the front door. “Expecting you,” she said. Her white frame, two-story house was set back on an acre of Douglas firs, foxglove and other endemic Oregon greenery.

“You will need more than one day to see Portland,” Esther pronounced.

We agreed on three nights and she showed us to our upstairs quarters--three bedrooms, a bath and sitting room, with an already open window by our bed.

Downstairs, Esther’s living-room wall boasted an array of photographs of her six sons and one daughter, all of whom she had put through college after her husband died. She reeled off where her offspring now lived and their work: “Houston, Portland, Milwaukee, St. Helens, computers, the airlines. . . .” There are also 29 grandchildren, for each of whom she had made a quilt.

“That pink quilt there? Still on the shelf.” She had anticipated too freely. The last two grandchildren had been boys.

They say that even Chicago or Washington, D.C., gets more rain than Portland, but we awakened our first day in the Portland area with a light rain blowing in through the window. Portland was living up to its reputation, for us.

The city hits you with a kaleidoscope of images, and we spent the next two days trying to see them all: converging rivers; breezy, arching bridges with their green-steel trademark superstructures; Washington Park and its enormous rose garden; Jake’s Famous Crawfish Restaurant, which opened in 1892; the Old Country Buffet (a lucky find at 82nd and Causey avenues), with patrons lined up out the door, and the Pendleton Woolen Mills outlet across the Columbia River in Washougal, Wash.

Crossing the Columbia again, we went over the Bridge of the Gods at Cascade Locks and joined a stern-wheeler river cruise down the Columbia Gorge--something Esther had lined up for us.

As we cruised through a fairyland-like landscape of low clouds and blowing drizzle, the riverboat captain explained that the original Bridge of the Gods, according to Indian legend, had been a land bridge that spanned the river. Huge boulders, fragments of the collapsed archway, were dispersed in the river, as though to prove the bridge’s once-upon-a-time existence.

Along the riverbank, Indians on jury-rigged, cantilevered platforms exercised their year-round fishing rights. One fisherman was struggling with his catch of the day, trying to drag it up the embankment using both hands.

Coho Charlie (his platform was just to the left), the captain told us, has a better approach to fishing. He fills a washtub with fertilized salmon eggs, lets them hatch, then dumps them into the river. Everybody knows that salmon return to their birthplace for spawning. Next year, these same salmon will swim back upriver and “jump into Charlie’s tub.” We were indeed in tall-tale country. Paul Bunyan territory. Maybe even Bigfoot, or his alias Sasquatch, was hiding out there in the brush, too.

Esther awaited us with her complimentary marathon car tour of St. Helens: Down through the old town where the courthouse fronted on the river, and two-decker houseboats--rimmed with flower boxes--were tied up at the dock. We saw a wooded island in the middle of the river where fireworks would be set off on the Fourth of July, and heard lots of local gossip, things you don’t necessarily see or learn through a tour-bus window.

At 9:15 p.m. it was still daylight. Why so much later in Oregon? Partly because Oregon is farther west than California. I had not noticed that on the map before.

Making Esther our present of an Indian soapstone carving the next morning, we paid our three nights’ lodging ($15 per person) and said goodby. Later this year, Esther may visit us in Fresno. She has always wanted to see Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. If Esther does visit us, her lodging fee will be $5 per night and we will show her the local attractions.

Hospitality club members frequently offer their guests added amenities. These may include tours, extended stays, meals or other gestures. They should not be expected unless spelled out ahead of time, but don’t be surprised if they’re offered.

Hospitality exchanging comes in all shapes and colors. Usually the exchange is round-robin rather than one-to-one. You may not necessarily repay the person you stay with, but someone else will. You offer hospitality to someone in your home, and someone else does the same for you.

Or it may consist of a reciprocal stay, where you spend a week with a family this summer and they return the visit the next year. Your listing in a club directory does not obligate you to accept guests. It means that you intend to offer hospitality at your convenience.

We crossed the river again for our third and last hospitality stay, with Bill and Barbara in Kelso, just inside Washington.

A T-bone steak dinner was already planned and practically waiting when we pulled into their suburban cul-de-sac, just off the Cowlitz River. This was the river that all the ash and mud and trees had come down when Mt. St. Helens exploded in 1980, they told us. You would still find ash under the carpet if you looked.

Next day, which happened to be July 4, Bill--a Washington state tax assessor--and Barbara were to take us to Mt. St. Helens for a look at the tangled, toothpick forest of giant fir felled by the mountain’s eruption. An A-frame cabin up the mountain was still half-filled with mud and ash that had hardened into concrete-like material, turning the edifice into its own monument.

That night we took Bill and Barbara to dinner, then celebrated the holiday, with several thousand others, around a lake in their neighboring town’s central park. There was a live band, beer sausage, fireworks, a light rain and a sea of blanket-covered heads.

Next morning, with our round of hospitality stays ended, we settled up with our hosts and took leave. In fact, our total cost for the two nights, amenities and all, was “no charge.”

Most hospitality exchange clubs don’t charge a lodging fee, and added amenities (meals, entertainment, tours, sightseeing) are also frequently offered free or negotiated for in advance at a nominal price.

It was time to head home, but first we had to see the Oregon trail to its end. An hour’s sprint west along the Columbia River, in the tracks of Lewis and Clark, got us to its mouth at Astoria. A modern steel bridge now spans the river’s expanse, seeing U.S. 101 safely to the Washington side--the terminus all but hidden in fog.

“We call it the ‘bridge to nowhere,”’ the service station attendant told us.

We turned south down 101 in the other direction.

In the morning, we drove down the coast to Seaside, Ore., with its creamy saltwater taffy, rattlesnake beer and real Oregon blackberry wine for tourist take-home presents. Then on to Tillamook and Cheddar cheese. The afternoon found us in Newport, Ore., and Mo’s Cafe--slumgullion (chowder filled with shrimp), salad heaped with more shrimp and toasted thick garlic butter bread, all for $13. We treated ourselves to a beachfront stay at Shiloh Inn for $70 because there were no home-stay candidates in the area.

The following day brought us through more see-it-to-believe-it Oregon coastal landscapes, but this last lap of the trip was different.

We were again merely sightseers, tourists, outsiders. We never quite got beneath the surface of things the way we had when we visited Lee Ann and Esther and Bill and Barbara. Maybe another day, when we had more time and the hospitality clubs had more coastal lodging to offer, we would do up that stretch of the trip again and see its other, hidden, dimension.

Back in Fresno, we moved our Oregon adventure over into the “mission accomplished” column of our logbook and checked for upcoming hosting and travel events.

Helma and Anke would arrive the next month for a short tour of Yosemite, using our home as their base. They are from Wennigsen, Germany. (Earlier in the summer, Astrid had been here from Isenbuttel, not too far from Wennigsen.)

Don and his wife, from Canada, wanted to come for the Rose Bowl Parade on New Year’s Day, as did a teacher from Australia. January was summer break for the schools Down Under. And nextsummer there were the offers from Canada, England and Germany for a two- or three-week home-and-car exchange.

In September, I’m headed to San Francisco for a seminar. It was time to start arranging hospitality lodging for those three days. And while I did so, a bed and breakfast stay in Santa Barbara for $9 per night simply popped off the page of the Traveler’s Information Exchange club directory. A weekend stay? Worth checking out.

GUIDEBOOK

All About Hospitality

Hospitality club membership often provides access to thousands of listings worldwide. There are a number of clubs to choose from, and membership fees typically are less than $50 per year.

A partial list of hospitality clubs:

Globetrotters, BCM/Roving, London WC1N 3XX, England.

Hospitality Exchange, 4215 Army St., San Francisco 94110, (415) 826-8248.

INNterlodging Co-op, P.O. Box 7044, Tacoma, Wash. 98407, (206) 756-0343.

International Home Exchange/Intervac USA, P.O. Box 190070, San Francisco 94119, (415) 435-3497.

Teacher Swap, P.O. Box 4130, Rocky Point, N.Y. 11778, (516) 744-6403.

Vacation Exchange Club, P.O. Box 820, Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712, (800) 638-3841 or (808) 638-8747.

Worldwide Home Exchange Club, 45 Hans Place, London SW1X OJZ, England, 011-44-71-589 6055, or 806 Brantford Ave., Silver Spring, Md. 20904.