This past weekend we opened our apartment to a couch surfer for the first time ever.  For those who don’t know about couch surfing, it’s like letting a friend sleep on your couch for a night except you’ve never met that friend before. Yes, we are both genuinely nice people, but we do have ulterior motives for letting complete strangers into our home. Really what we want is a good reputation on the couchsurfing website so that hopefully someone somewhere will let us stay on their couch for free while we’re traveling. So we signed up for couchsurfing and offered to host some people, and this past weekend we got a live one.

So far the first thing any potential surfer wants to know is how close we live to 6th street. The immediate response that comes to mind is, “um…we’re thirty,” but I keep that to myself and just say 10 miles. Our recent guest was no different. She wanted to know how far we were from 6th street, and she also needed to know if/when we could pick her up. We were headed to a game night at a friend’s house that evening so I told her we could pick her up before hand if she wanted to go to game night with us or afterwards if she didn’t mind waiting until 11ish. Her texted response was, “you can pick me up after lol take your time,” which in my mind translated to, “I’ll be out on 6th street until the early AM so try to be later than 11, okay?” Apparently I am not fluent in couchsurfer texting because when we picked her up at 1AM she told us she doesn’t drink.

Other than that, the hosting experience went alright. Our guest was a lovely woman who is traveling the US and was looking to experience all that Austin Texas had to offer.  We were pretty busy with a lot of other commitments so we really didn’t get to spend very much time with her but it sounded like she took the bull by the longhorns and saw in two days pretty much all of Austin. In the evenings we just picked her up and brought back to our place. We don’t mind playing chauffeur if we get to meet interesting people.

Aside from the couch surfing we have plenty to keep us busy. We are starting to purchase our initial flights for the initial leg of the trip, Hawaii and Australia (which reminds me, check out our itinerary page for a complete listing of our pending travels). We gave notice to our apartment that we won’t renew. Now we need to find a storage facility for all our stuff that we want to keep….or a website where people offer to store all your crap for free.