There exists a worldwide community willing to host you in their homes for free even though they’ve never met you. I’m talking about a group called Warmshowers, which provides accommodation for cyclists who are traveling through their town.
The idea of hosting travelers well predates inns and hotels. The native Americans provided food and shelter for the early explorers. The early pioneers provided supplies and a warm place to rest for others like them who braved the journey across the country.
Warmshowers hosts know the pleasure of ending a long day of cycling with running water to clean off the day’s accumulation of sweat. This is where the group gets its name. While the majority of hosts offer access to a shower, services vary depending on the host. Most will allow camping on their property. Some have extra rooms, some give you access to their kitchen, and some will even provide meals.
The web site for warm showers lists hosts by area and includes a description of what the host offers and reviews of the host. For some areas the pickings are slim, and the reviews hardly matter, but in urban areas the choices can be overwhelming, and your selection may be based on information gleaned from the host’s profile page.
During my recent bike camping trip, I stayed with four different hosts, and the accommodations varied as much as the people. My first stay was in Port Townsend, a town draped over steep hills, and this house was no exception. As I climbed the last hill to their house, I grumbled to myself, “this is already not free”. When I arrived, Dan came down the steps to help me carry my gear into the house. I appreciated the effort as I still had to carry my bicycle up.
Once inside, he showed me to my room. It was simple, with little more than a bed, but it had its own bathroom. The entire wall across from the bed with filled with books, lining shelves from end to end like a library. I knew one night would not be sufficient for this place.
Because I was particularly wiped from this ride, I pulled out a bottle of wine after my shower though it was barely 2pm. I offered my host a glass, and he was quick to join me uttering that it was five o’clock somewhere. He told me he was mostly retired but still did work in community planning. On the walls were pictures of him from magazines so I guessed he’d had a long career in building community. He also shared that the goal he and his wife had in opening their home was to pay back some of the hospitality they received in their years as cyclists.
The Warmshowers guests were given access to the whole first floor, which included a full kitchen. The door to the house was always unlocked, and you got the impression that it wasn’t necessary to even check in before stopping by for a night. I had the feel of staying with family.
When I told Dan I was headed to the store, he suggested I look around the garden first and take anything I needed. I had been planning to make pasta sauce from scratch, and their garden had everything I needed except for the ground beef. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised as the garden formed a moat around the house, one that was guarded by a tall fence to keep the deer from harvesting the crops as well. In the back was a greenhouse that allowed the tomatoes to grow in the cool Pacific northwest climate.
Since my legs were still sore from cycling, I decided to walk the ten minutes to the local organic grocery. I grabbed the last package of ground beef, and while I was browsing the pasta aisle, I overheard a woman inquiring as to whether they had any more ground beef. They were giving her suggestions on the next closest stores when I interrupted and asked how much she needed. She looked puzzled so I continued, “I have a one pound package here, but I only need half a pound. If you like, I can buy it and then split it with you if we can get a bag from the butcher.”
She said that she only needed a half pound as well, and the butcher, who’d been listening to our exchange, said she’d cut and package it for us. The staff were apparently so touched by our sharing that, when I got to the register, they wouldn’t even charge me for the beef, and that was $8 per pound organic beef. I headed home pleased that a big pasta dinner was only going to cost me the price of a box of pasta. Free lodging and free food!
My second stay was in Anacortes, terminal for the ferry to the San Juan islands and Canada. My hostess, Beth, and I kept in touch regarding my arrival time, and she was there to meet me when I rolled in. She welcomed me and took me to an adorably furnished guesthouse. She could tell I was shocked by the quality of the accommodations, and she said that they normally rent it out as an AirBnB, but Warmshowers guests get first dibs.
Beth told me that she prefers Warmshowers guests because they interact with her and her husband. She said AirBnB guests always have an agenda so they’re not around much, whereas Warmshowers guests just want to relax and, perhaps through some sense of obligation, always take time to chat. I experienced this later as her husband and I sat out on the sun deck and enjoyed a glass of wine while talking about world travel.
Every time I went back to the room, I just couldn’t believe my good fortune. I also couldn’t help but look online and found that the place runs for $125 per night, and I was staying for free with people who didn’t know me before today.
It wasn’t exactly free; I did pick up a bag of locally roasted coffee that morning from Port Townsend to give them. I decided from the beginning that I would buy a gift from each of the towns I stayed and bring it to my hosts in the next town. For my first hosts, it was a jar of jam, and my next hosts would get pastries from a local bakery.
I knew from their profile that my next guests had three children so I decided to bring a giant sticky bun and some cookies from a bakery in Anacortes. Laura told me that her kids were likely to be taking the same ferry from Salt Spring island that I would be on so I had a guessing game when half a dozen children showed up at the ferry dock.
I didn’t say anything so they were surprised when they showed up at the house and I was already there, since I was able to get ahead of them on my bicycle once we disembarked the ferry. While Laura and Mike were both interesting, their kids turned out to be the highlights. They were at the perfect adolescent age where they could think and communicate independently. They were much more knowledgeable of the world than I was at that age having absorbed education instead of fighting it as I did.
One showed me a flawless blanket she had made, and her father said he was considering buying her a loom. Another showed me the bee hives she kept and allowed me to use the honey from the comb in the tea she prepared for me. The youngest, a boy, had to live in the shadow of his two accomplished sisters, but while I was there, he and his father were building a treehouse together.
My accommodation was a shed out back with a couch. Again surrounded by books, I looked forward to my warm cozy place for the evening. At dinner, the boy shared with me that the shed used to be his father’s bike workshop. Mike was passionate about cycling, and as soon as I arrived, he began to ask me questions about cycling in the San Francisco bay area since he was an avid mountain biker and familiar with its history.
Did I mention dinner? Yes; these hosts provided not just a warm shower but warm meals as well: dinner and breakfast! Dinner was chicken pad thai, and we all sat at the table talking about each person’s interests. Breakfast was the same with scrambled eggs and toast around the breakfast table. The conversation was a little less lively as pre-teens don’t generally wake up so well.
I had slept wonderfully on the couch with my sleeping bag draped over me. The only challenge was that the bathroom was inside the house, so when I needed to use it in the middle of the night, I had to leave the shed, walk through the backyard and into the house to get there, kind of the reverse of go outside to use the outhouse. This would have been feasible enough except their dog barked in alarm every time I entered the house.
To avoid waking them up all night as I tend to make several trips to the toilet, I decided instead to use my coffee mug as a bedpan. I probably could have peed in the yard, but I thought that to be offensive to my gracious hosts. Some might find it offensive that I used my coffee mug, but I’d always read that urine was sterile, and I figured I could clean it out in the morning.
After breakfast, I packed up my gear and headed off to my next host. This one was different as I had stayed at her place the year before, only I had booked it through AirBnB. While I was there on my previous cycling trip, she told me she was also a Warmshowers host, and I could have stayed for free had I booked through that site.
This year, I was taking advantage of that offer, and Cheryl turned out to be an extraordinarily generous host. I had often heard of Tofino, and when I originally planned my trip, I was had thought to ride there. I mentioned the trip to Cheryl, and she said the road to Tofino was a winding narrow one with few shoulders and lots of traffic over a large mountain range.
I decided to be bold and asked her if I could convince her to drive me over for a night. She easily agreed and even booked the hostel in Tofino for us. It turns out one of her kids lives there so she had a few connections. Unfortunately, none of her connections were there that weekend so we did have to pay for our hostel rooms.
Naturally, I paid for gas and treated her to dinner, but it was an exceptionally kind thing she had done for a relative stranger. Sadly, that was the last of my hosts for the trip, but as I rode on, I began to think of just what a wonderful thing Warmshowers was, bringing together hosts and travelers today, reviving a generosity that was common for thousands of years in human history.