Budgeting for a long-term trip is often pretty tricky. On the outset of our trip, it was pretty obvious that the “hostel for 2 days, move to the next city” formula wasn’t going to sustain itself. We had a few ideas in mind, including a farm volunteer scheme called “WWOOF” (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and the romantic notion of finding pub and hostel jobs as we went along. Though we found some limited success with finding jobs, in general they weren’t reliable enough to be more than a once-in-a-while jackpot. And while WWOOFing was a lot of fun

Things were looking pretty grim for our pocketbooks, until we ran across Help Exchange. Help Exchange is at first glance really similar to WWOOFing, in that you agree to work for a host, usually for 4 hours a day, in exchange for room and board. However, There’s two major differences that set it apart.

1. HelpExchange is not strictly based around organic farms. While I love working on organic farms to death, the relative isolation on the farms limits you to areas that aren’t exactly sightseeing Meccas.
2. The website for HelpExchange is leaps and bounds better than WWOOFs, giving you maps of hosts, pictures, suggested # of people and expected work, and even reviews by other helpers.

We’ve done 3 help exchange stints so far, all of them very different but a ton of fun. You can read about all three here:

Bartending in North Yorkshire
Yardwork in the Welsh Countryside
Painting in a French Chateau

Our next HelpExchange visit was pretty much night and day from our first experience. While the bunkhouse could probably be best described as a fun sort of hectic on some days, working in Wales was at a nice, relaxing pace.

Gordon and Muriel don’t own a guesthouse, or a big farm, or really any business at all (apart from the occasional B&B guest). They are just a friendly retired couple living in Llandrillo (to pronounce this properly - try a few times, fail horribly, and grumble about the Welsh alphabet), who need some help here and there with some outdoor work and renovation projects, and have been using HelpExchange for this for the past few years.

Our work was fairly simple - 3 trees had been felled in the past few years, and the logs were starting to rot on the ground. We had to relocate them to a drier place off the ground. Easy enough, and you never felt overworked with our two hosts.

Unlike in Clapham, the work really isn’t the highlight here though. The accommodations that Gordon and Muriel were a staggeringly huge change from the typical hostel setup, with private rooms, a huge comfortable jacuzzi, and satellite TV (I’ll fess up - 5 months without TV caused a bit of a binge once we had unlimited access to it again). To top it off, Gordon is a fantastic cook, and every meal was unique and delicious.

The work scheme we went on was full days, with full days off every other day, so we had a lot of opportunity to see the Welsh countryside, including Llangollen  (this one I can pronounce - it’s like a choking sound followed by “Langothlen”), and a very picturesque drive by our hosts.

Our final Help Exchange visit - of this round, anyway - was the most immediately stunning - we were to stay and work in Le Castel, a chateau in Normandy. You tend to like your prospects when you’re driven up to this:

Le Castel is a guesthouse in Normandy, run by Jon, a generous and friendly Brit who moved away from a life of celebrity journalism and hobknobbing with Elton John and Kiley Minogue to run this quiet little guesthouse, complete with stately yard, elegantly designed rooms, and one llama.

The llama, while a bit incongruous at a French villa, was one of the highlights when we saw the listing. Fernando is a llama through and through, and while he wasn’t quite ready to be pet by anyone other than his owner, he was perfectly friendly and always a bit of a sight.

As for accommodation, if our rooms in Wales seemed luxurious, Le Castel only upped the ante. Our private bedroom was now the Dauphin suite, a massive, elegantly appointed loft; our private bathroom was now a beautiful ensuite clawfoot bath, with a window overlooking the grounds.

Another unique opportunity was the chance to meet fellow HelpExchangers. Our last few places tended to keep only one person or couple on at a time, which meant that you only heard about other people doing HelpExchange second hand. However, since Le Castel is quieter this time of year, there’s more room for volunteers to stay, and we’ve been able to meet 2 other couples. With one of them an ex-chef, nights around the dinner table are always great.

As always, there’s opportunities to see the local highlights. We visited a seaside market and a couple of castles for our first day off, and are heading to Bayeux to see their famous medieval tapestries tomorrow.

From here, Help Exchange isn’t quite over. We have another guesthouse in the south of France to visit. After that, it’s back up to Holland to meet with Niki’s mom and see some relatives for a wedding anniversary and Sinterklaus (the Dutch Christmas celebrations).

Our first HelpExchange gig was just south of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, in a little village called Clapham. Our host, Anne, was looking for some help with a bunkhouse she was running. The bunkhouse had a shop and pub connected to it, so it seemed like a pretty interesting opportunity, and not far from the type of job we were hunting for when looking for paid gigs.

The bunkhouse itself was a perfect English countryside place - inside a old listed building, and with a pub filled with locals every night. I tended to the bar, while Niki typically ran the shop.

The area is a hit with cavers due to the nearby Ingleborough cave system, one of the best in England, and the clientele of the bunkhouse reflected this. Every day we’d have our rush of walkers - far overequipped Brits out to see the show cave of Ingleborough and hike for a while along the trails, but outfitted as if they were ready to climb Everest. Later in the week we got the real deal - a caving class filled with British military cadets being trained by an experienced caver to do the tougher climbs over a 4 day course.

Later in the night the tourists changed over to locals, and nearly the whole village would come for a pint or a cider after work - and laugh at my real ale pouring skills for the first few days (pro tip - it’s a good deal different than your typical keg and a few practice pints are recommended.) The town even had it’s own local celebrity - James, a regular at the pub, was the lead singer of a band called EMF. We didn’t recognize the name either, but you might recognize one of their songs:

If you’re in the area and interested about the bunkhouse, you can get more information here - http://www.claphambunk.com/

Sorry about the technical difficulties - my web hosting provider did a major overhaul of their system, and as a result, the blog had some technical issues. If you’re reading this, we should be back up and running.