Everyone knows that with the advance of the internet, a revolution has taken place in the way people travel. Most of us haven’t used a travel agent since the last century, and with sites like tripadvisor, you can ascertain from other travellers whether you want to take a chance on a place. Of course, the digital age also has its drawbacks while you’re on the road. Rarely now will the solo traveller have that exhilarating heady feeling of being wildly free and blissfully removed from the world. How could she when she’s holding her phone?  

But I digress. (And I hope I’m wrong about her phone.)

Recently my husband Rob and our twelve-year-old son Quinn and I spent a month in Spain and Morocco. It’s not the first time we’ve pulled Quinn out of school to travel. We do it every year. But instead of taking a road trip in our camper van, or staying for several months in the same town in Mexico, this time we travelled the way I used to. We backpacked. We were on the road. We made our way from one town to the next, cramming ourselves into dilapidated buses, hurtling down dusty Moroccan roads, smiling at Berber nomads and sometimes staying at a villager’s house if invited. In Morocco, it was impossible not to have an adventure or enlivening encounter every waking hour.  Having adventures in Morocco was familiar to me. And this time the adventures were often fuelled by Quinn kicking his soccer ball everywhere we walked, which inevitably led to passing strangers urging Quinn to kick the ball to them—leading to an impromptu game with more passers-by joining—which often serendipitously opened us up to new worlds of people. 

But something that was distinctly not familiar to my old backpacking days were workaway.info, airbnb.com, and blablacar.com. Those three websites transformed the nature of our trip.

Every night in Spain, from Madrid to Seville to Barcelona, we stayed at airbnb’s. As long as we had wireless for our tablets (we don’t have a phone) we could plan as we went, booking airbnb’s a day or two ahead, whatever our freewheeling schedule allowed. Of all the airbnb’s we stayed at, only one was a dump. I took photos to prove it and airbnb refunded all our money. (There was also an airbnb in Fez which advised us to hire a guide to tour the medina and the guide turned out to have ulterior motives but that’s another blog post.)

Most nights in Morocco we found cheap hotels (averaging less than 20 euros a night) in whatever town we ended up in. But it was in Morocco that we did our first workaway and this experience turned out to be the highlight of our trip.

Workaway is an online community bringing together adventure-seeking travellers with people looking for help with work projects or interesting activities. It’s like WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) but it’s not just work on farms. It can be anything. In exchange for doing some work the traveller gets free room and board. Some examples featured on the site include : “Help Family Run Hostel in Greece”, “Help at a Community School in Nepal”, “Help Build Eco-House In New Zealand.”

You could spend all day on this website dreaming about your next trip. While I was planning our trip, I didn’t expect to see any workaway offerings in Morocco, remembering how otherworldly and ancient much of the country was from my two previous travels there, so was surprised when I found that even this relatively new website had reached North Africa. One workaway posting came from an American family who’d moved to the coast of Morocco and needed help building their house. That didn’t sound that culturally enticing so I kept searching. Finally I saw one posting that really stood out, mainly because of its rave reviews. It scored 100, meaning that everyone who’d stayed there had given the Berber House the highest possible score in every category. I contacted the owner Mohamed and he said he’d be delighted if we came. We just needed to get to a town called Imantanout in southern Morocco.

A month later we found ourselves inside an unmoving ramshackle bus at the noisy chaotic Marrakech bus station, waiting for the bus to fill with enough people to take us to the little Berber town of Imantanout. Even though we had to wait three hours before the vehicle moved, it was preferable to what we’d gone through before getting on the bus, where we’d been swarmed by shysters trying to sell us dubious bus tickets. A few days earlier, Rob’s wallet had been pick-pocketed in northern Morocco and we were harbouring bad feelings about the country.

By the time we finally reached the little Berber town of Imantanout near dusk we were frazzled and bus-weary. The place where the bus dropped us off was dirty and crowded. We needed wireless to contact Mohamed and couldn’t find it anywhere. “This is all too hard,” I blurted out, looking at the crowds of men in their djellabas and skull caps, many of them staring at us, the only non-Moroccans in town. “I don’t remember Morocco being so difficult when I was here before. Let’s just go to this workaway place for a couple days and then get out of here, go back to Spain.” Rob and Quinn agreed.

Everything changed an hour later when we came across a central square full of people and cafes off to the side. I found wireless and Quinn played soccer in the square, soon joined by a gaggle of kids. Mohamed came to pick us up and drive us to his tiny village in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and that’s when we realized what all those travellers had been raving about.  

The Berber House is Mohamed’s own house where he lives with his extended family. We entered the expansive leafy open-air courtyard, the heart of the house filled with comfortable couches, tables and books. The first person to greet us was Mohamed’s two-year-old daughter, an expressive little imp who within minutes of our arrival jumped into my arms, looked at me with huge brown eyes and initiated a high five. After the hassles of northern Morocco, arriving at the Berber House felt like gulping spring water in a desert. We couldn’t believe our luck. Soon, a young woman named Julie came out of her room. (Guests and the family stay in simple rooms off the courtyard.) “I thought I heard Canadian accents out here!” she exclaimed, shaking our hands. Julie was from Thunder Bay and had been travelling on her own for over a year, staying mostly at workaways around the world. She and I immediately hit it off. Then out came Mireia from Barcelona but living in Ireland. Again, another instant travelling soul mate who I could spend hours talking with. (Coincidentally, Mireia happened to be reading a book of women’s travel stories in which I’d contributed. Small world!) Then Angela from Boulder and California appeared. Same instant connection. While I was talking to my new friends, Quinn was learning a soccer trick from a young German guy named Nico. Rob was talking to a fun couple from North Carolina, Veronica and Hunter, who sold their house to travel the world. When they’d almost run out of money in Italy they realized they could go home and start working again, or keep travelling but only do workaways. They decided to keep travelling, mainly doing workaways which focused on eco-building. Best of all we got to meet Khalid, Mohamed’s sweet funny twenty-something relative who over the next week would take the group of us on outings to integrate us into Berber culture.

How could this Shangri-la be a workaway? What was the actual work we’d be doing? It turned out to be the off-season for the Berber House’s olive grove so rather than working we would pay a small fee for our room and board. The owner Mohamed truly just wants to introduce people to the lovely gentle lifestyle of the Berber people.

Some of the things we got to do with Khalid that week were hiking to a remote nomad market where we all ate breakfast inside a tent surrounded by dozens of Berber men drinking mint tea; hiking up a mountain to a cave; visiting a hammam (public bathhouse) where a woman scrubbed the layers off our skin while unselfconscious naked Berber women chatted around us; visiting a school where I was happily swarmed by giggly little girls who played with my hair and sang to me; learning to make proper mint tea, bread and tagines. Khalid even showed us a mind-boggling card trick which had us all stumped for hours.

The best part was the bond we all formed in spending every day together, telling travel stories, and laughing. I hadn’t found a place like this in years, maybe not since I stayed at the remote beach campground on the faraway little island of Taveuni, Fiji (which I wrote about in my first book, Kite Strings of the Southern Cross.) I find that when places are difficult to get to—sometimes taking several days of hard travel to find—that’s where you come across the people you could be friends with for life. You belong to the same tribe. For example,  you only learn about the Berber House if you sign up on workaway—which only appeals to a certain kind of person—and you must have the fortitude to forge through aggressive northern Morocco and have faith things will get better as you head deeper and deeper into the south. Those obstacles alone filter out the vast majority of people from ever reaching the Berber House. The few who make it there are sure to have a lot in common. And have a lot of fun together.

Although we wanted to stay forever, we had to push on since we still had so much to see in our month-long trip. Our new friends from the Berber House left the same day, heading east while we headed southwest toward the Sahara Desert, to a village we never would have learned about if it hadn’t been for a traveller at the Berber House. The Sahara Desert also took days of hard travel to reach—and was stunningly, impossibly beautiful—but since we came across few other travellers there, we never made friends like we had at the Berber House.

The third website that was central to our trip was blablacar.com, a European ride sharing website which we used in Spain. Drivers offer rides to wherever they’re going, and people who need rides type in where they want to go, see who’s driving there, then connect with the driver. It’s fun to meet people this way and much cheaper than the bus or train.

If you’ve found any websites that have enhanced/hindered your travels please comment (or feel free to comment about anything else!)

It was getting dark and I had just arrived at my first-ever airbnb.com homestay—airbnb is an online community where you can book a place to stay at someone’s house, or rent out a room yourself. It’s a step up from couchsurfing.com since you pay to stay, but places are generally much less expensive than hotels. And more personable. The place I’d chosen was out in the country, a miniature Victorian village of tiny buildings constructed on a woman’s farm, eight miles outside of Ithaca, New York. It was C$32. From the photos, Karenville—named after the owner—looked exactly like the kind of eccentric, laid-back, friendly sort of place I wanted to spend the night. I was on a solo road trip—a birthday present to myself last month—on my way from my home in Wakefield, Quebec, to Pittsburgh, to see Bruce Springsteen the next night. Staying in hotels didn’t appeal. Airbnb and Karenville did.

Except as I looked around I realized this place looked nothing like Karenville. I was on a lonely country road, parked in the driveway of what looked like a regular farmhouse, no miniature Victorian village, and no Karen—shown in her profile picture to have long silver braids and lots of animals. I re-checked the directions that google had given me on the airbnb site. I had the right address. I tried knocking on the door of the farmhouse but nobody was home. Finally, a car pulled up and an elderly couple with some grandkids in the back eyed me suspiciously.

“Who are you?” said the woman, rolling down the window.

I explained my predicament. It took them a few minutes to warm up to me and believe my story, but after seeing the address on my ipad they were convinced.  

“Looks like you’ve been scammed,” said the man behind the steering wheel. “There’s no B&B anywhere around these parts. I’ve lived here all my life. Never heard of this woman, or a miniature village.” He chuckled. 

“Did you pay her already?” asked one of the kids in the backseat.  

“Yeah, I did, through paypal.”

“Well you can kiss that money goodbye,” said the woman, shaking her head in a way that showed her disgust with the depravity of the modern world.

“But Karen seemed so nice,” I said. “And the place seemed real. Look at all these photos!” I held up my ipad again.

They didn’t know what else to say and I sensed they wanted to go inside now that the excitement was over. Feeling dejected and confused I drove back to Ithaca. Just an hour earlier I’d eaten at the Moosewood Restaurant and had wandered around the pretty town,  watching students and parents getting tours of Cornell. Now back in town, I found a Starbucks with wifi, found Karen’s contact info and sent her a message through the airbnb site: “What’s going on? I went to the address and it wasn’t Karenville. Are you real?”

Karen wrote back immediately. “Yes! I’m real! Google maps refuses to give my proper address on the airbnb website. It must be because we’re off the grid and kind of hidden. Sorry about that! Come back and go a further quarter mile down the road. My husband will meet you out there with a flashlight. We don’t have electricity and it’s dark.”

Except for the correct address, which is rather crucial, Karenville turned out to be everything Karen claimed it was on the website: a rustic, tiny, off-grid ‘village’ where you can stay in an old-fashioned ‘hotel’ that’s ten by ten. Karen’s husband gave me a tour the first night of all the buildings, each one like a dollhouse for grownups.

The next morning Karen told me about her frustration trying to get airbnb to give the right address to her guests. I also tried to contact them about this but got frustrated myself when I realized there is no ‘Contact Us’ page. For such a huge company—serving 192 countries and reportedly worth ten billion dollars—this is shocking, and arrogant. After saying goodbye to Karen, I stopped by the farmhouse of the old couple to let them know that Karenville is, in fact, real, and just a quarter of the mile down the road.

My next airbnb stay was in Pittsburgh, in a treed neighbourhood of old houses and spring blossoms on the boulevards.

First, I’ll tell you about the concert. You can skip ahead if for some reason you don’t know about Bruce Springsteen and the energy he generates wherever he goes.

The Springsteen concert was fantastic, as always. Whenever I’m in the midst of one of his concerts—dancing, singing along, trying to take it all in—I’m on such a high that I sometimes feel that if I died right after that would be okay; I could go out on a high note.

On the afternoon of the concert in Pittsburgh, I’d made friends with some fellow fans as we’d lined up to try and get ‘pit’ tickets (where you can be right in the very front as opposed to just on the floor) and I was with the same people again at the concert—a fun Pittsburgh couple, and two cute young lawyer guys who turned out to be from Toronto. While waiting for the concert to start, we’d discussed Rob Ford, Toronto’s most interesting neighbourhoods, Downtown Abbey, and other concerts we’d been to. The five of us ended up becoming fast friends, hanging out and dancing together throughout the show. The band played their usual thrilling, high-octane, three-and-a-half hours, and when they finally left after the last song, Bruce Springsteen didn’t. He just stood there by himself, hesitating. He didn’t seem to want to leave the stage.  

“What’s he doing?” people asked. The lights were on and everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Then Bruce walked over to an organ, sat down, and started talking as he noodled around on the organ keys. You could tell this wasn’t rehearsed. Everything he said was off the top of his head. He said he realized he’d been playing the guitar for almost fifty years. Fifty years. He couldn’t believe this. He talked about how much music had meant to him, how it had saved his life. Then he said if it wasn’t for us, for his fans, he’d be nothing. He wanted to thank us, to “thank us for showing up so often.” “You’ve added so much to my life,” he said, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. I was thinking, Geez, you’ve added so much to our life. You could tell he meant every word he spoke. Then he sang a couple of songs.  

It was probably the most genuine heartfelt moment I’d ever witnessed in a public space.  

Now back to airbnb, not nearly as interesting:  I got horribly lost trying to find my way back to my airbnb place. The woman who owned the house where I was staying had kindly printed me out directions the night before to get to the concert downtown. I figured all I had to do was backtrack to get home. But no. The main road I’d come in on was a one-way street. I ended up in a dodgy neighbourhood at midnight asking directions at a gas station where the girl behind the counter was behind bullet-proof glass.  

When I finally got back at 1 a.m., I worried that I was waking up the home owner and her boyfriend. We all shared a bathroom and my bedroom was right next to theirs. Then at 6 a.m., they were the ones who woke me up with what was either a blender, a hair dryer, or a stealth bomber in their kitchen.  

Clearly, this was another drawback of airbnb. It can be a little cozy. But for fifty dollars, I wasn’t complaining. My bedroom was lovely and had a cushy bed.  

At the last minute I decided to book a final airbnb at the half-way point. There was no way I could make the ten-hour drive home on five hours of sleep. Although, again, I got ridiculously lost roaming around the Rochester suburb in search of this last airbnb place (I really need a GPS!) when I finally found it, it was perfect. The friendly, twenty-something owner of the little bungalow had cleaned up her craft room for me. The bed in her craft room was a luxurious retreat of duvet heaven and I slept ten hours straight. It cost $30.

Overall, I’m so impressed with airbnb (except for their lack of a Contact Us page) that I might try renting out our tent trailer for some summer nights, right in our woods in Wakefield. Thirty dollars for a night including a vegan breakfast? I’ll just make sure the address is right.


Click here for my blurb and video on Springsteen's Born To Run: Top 40 Travel Songs of All Time (Worldhum.com)