Finding A HomeAway From Home

Much love to for providing me this platform to share a very personal story of how we choose to travel as a family. Please read on!

On the rooftop terrace of our Barcelona rental apartment with a view of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia.

There’s this thing we do when we travel together as a family, only, it’s not really a thing, it’s more a philosophical game plan, a way of life on the road, a very specific way in which we choose to experience a new city or town, one that will frame our time spent in that place:

We rent a home or an apartment.

Through and VRBO.com, we find a cozy home away from home centrally located in a thriving neighborhood of our destination city or town and live as much like locals as possible. We try our best to assimilate because what we’re after as travelers are not cookie cutter tourist experiences. We don’t always want the free continental breakfast. We don’t want to experience someplace foreign from an arm’s length in a hotel district. We want to BE THERE, to really live there, if only for a short while. We want to shop in local markets for fresh in-season native berries, to occupy a table at a casual joint and strike up a conversation with neighbors, and to take runs around a picturesque lake that isn’t highlighted in the tour book. HomeAway has given my family the opportunity to do all of this and a whole lot more, time and time again.

In the infancy of our vacation planning, sometimes before a new adventure is even a glimmer in my wife’s eyes, I’ll peruse HomeAway’s partner site VRBO.com, just looking randomly for a charming spot to blend into…somewhere…anywhere. Scrolling through all the possible vacation rentals is like peeking into the soul of a thoroughly intoxicating place and gets me more stoked to spend time there than any Google image search of a postcard perfect tourist destination ever could.

The daybed in our Pacific Grove rental home.

Over the past several years, we’ve used VRBO to find and book a dreamy stone farmhouse in Saint Remy de Provence in the south of France, a 2 bedroom walkup in Paris a 1/2 block from Luxembourg Gardens, an apartment in Barcelona’s exquisite Eixample neighborhood with a rooftop terrace view of Sagrada Familia, a Green Lake cottage in Seattle, the Yellow Ferry houseboat in Sausilito, and a home in Pacific Grove California with a clear sightline of Monterrey bay. Each time, the photos and information provided on VRBO matched perfectly with the experience we received upon arrival and throughout our stay. And each time, it was because of HomeAway’s partner VRBO that our vacation ended up as far more than just vacation, but rather memorable short residency in a remarkable place.

Our Provencal rental home’s amazing kitchen. The outside of our Provence rental farmhouse.

It is so easy to replicate our travel game plan during your next family vacation — no matter where you are going — because there are more than a million listings, everything from condos to cottages and that your kids will remember for the rest of their lives, across 190 countries and at price points for every budget. Using HomeAway and its family of sites VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com to find your unique home away from home is 100% free and should be your first stop online when plotting your next family vacation adventure.

My girls navigating the Barcelona metro map. The view of our Barcelona apartment dining room.

Make a plan to really experience your next destination. Check out all of the to get started.

Oh! One more thing before you head off to dream about that trip to Chile, Santa Fe, or Zion National Park…

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of HomeAway. All the opinions and experience shared above are 100% honest and unbiased.