My last solo travel experience:
I have never met the couple we exchanged with, I remain friendly with them and still email with them all the time with our latest family news. It is a sentiment shared by many home exchange fans: once you start to swap homes, you will quickly get to know people who act as your hosts. Feeling this comfortable helps ensure that you feel safe when you arrive at your destination… And this is exactly what www.homeforswap.com offers…

That is so awesome. I loved reading your story. Trips do bring couples together, especially when its in a place outside their comfort zone.

My ex and I traveled so well together. My father once said (before we broke up), “You two know how to travel together, you just need to learn how to live in the real world together.” He was partly correct…but when it came to travel, we knew when to be together and when to take time apart. I have traveled so much alone that I need to have that alone time to reconnect with my independence. But when we were in our van, sleeping on the side of the road overnight in this little village in Mexico, and the policia came at sunrise knocking on our car, I couldn’t have felt safer to have my boyfriend there. He handled it so well…told me to stay in the van (it was a cargo van, so no windows for them to see me). The Mexican police are fine now (one good thing under Vicente Fox), but we weren’t sure at the time so it was great to have him play the masculine “I’ll take care of you” man and speak his fluent Spanish and get us out of the slight predicament without involving me…I really appreciated him that way. We both worked well in a crisis together while traveling, except for the time driving down a one way road in Toluca, (the most disgusting polluted city outside Mexico City) when five lanes of traffic were coming towards us and I was screaming at him while we had to reverse away from the traffic and honking horns. I didn’t handle that small crisis too well. :-)

My husband and I eloped to Antigua to get married. We stayed in an all-inclusive resort and there were many other couples there to marry too. Hurricane Lenny hit shortly after we arrived and so we were knee deep in water and grounded to the hotel for the whole week. We couldn’t enjoy the beach or the town or the fancy meals and surroundings, but we did enjoy ourselves. The bar was still open and the karaoke machine working so we crooned and danced and realized that we had the same laid back attitude of “well, at least we’re ok”. The island was devastated and people lost their homes and livelihoods. It was so sad to see how many couples broke up. They couldn’t handle the inconvenience of eating off paper plates (we were lucky there was food). This was not what they paid for (we were happy we’d get another free weekend as a result of the storm!) Couples showed their true colors and often didn’t like what they saw. Lucky they found out before it was too late. You can’t hide your true colors when traveling together—-I wouldn’t want to. I liked what I saw and married my colorful man anyway!

it’s good to know that a tough travelling experience can bring couples together, seems I always hear of it tearing them apart.