Our First Workaway Experience
Work away grants us the ability to travel the World on a budget. Our first experience was with a lovely family in a chalet in the French Alps. They have set the bar high for our future assignments!
What is Workaway?
Workaway is a platform where hosts provide accommodation in exchange for 4-5 hours of work per day, 5 days a week. Some are paid assignments, but most are not. For a small annual fee, you can search thousands of hosts in countries all over the world! Each host profile will show you the general location, type of work needed, and minimum duration. Hosts and workers can contact each other, requesting an assignment.
How we chose our assignment
This takes a lot of time searching and messaging! We initially wanted to start our journey in Portugal, so that is where I began our search. You can quickly eliminate some of the profiles based on location, living arrangements, personalities, or the type of work needed. Most hosts only have 1-2 workers at a time, so there is a chance that they are already full. Between January and February, I messaged about 20 hosts in Portugal and did not receive any responses. That was very unexpected! We decided to expand our search outside of Portugal, to include Spain and Southern France. Wherever we received an agreeable assignment, would be where we went after Ireland! After a couple of messages with a host in Sallanches, France, we agreed to our first exchange!
Our first day
We were quite nervous anticipating our first Workaway assignment. Our hosts did not have many pictures, no reviews, and we really didn’t know too much except that it would mostly be garden work with views of Mont Blanc. Spoiler alert: this assignment was amazing and beyond exceeded our expectations!
We knew instantly that our hosts were friendly and accommodating. They drove an hour to pick us up from the Geneva airport!! As we approached their house, we were blown away by the views. The house was huge and used to be a bed and breakfast; 3 floors, an industrial sized kitchen with walk in fridge, an office, multiple sitting areas, and 7 bedrooms! She introduced our private area as a suite and apologized that we did not have our own balcony. Umm this is beyond what we had expected! No balcony needed. Our private area consisted of 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. We couldn’t believe that this is where we would be staying (for free!) for the next month.
Our daily work
When we arrived, our hosts provided us a list of tasks to choose from, whichever we felt most comfortable with. I opted to do garden work, Greg chose the carpentry tasks. They were very flexible and allowed us to determine our own working hours. We normally started at 8am and worked for 4-5 hours.
Greg was happy to work with his hands and be creative. His first big project was designing and building a composting structure. He also built a gate for their side yard, painted the shed windows, and sanded and stained all of the doors and windows! Quite impressive!
My weeks consisted of trimming and weeding their yard. Each day I had about 5-6 bags of yard debris (if not more!). The thorns are no joke! By the halfway point, she kindly bought me new gardening gloves as the thorns had ripped through most of the fingers. I enjoyed finding snails and watching them move. I’ve never seen so many snails!
What about food?
Each host is different, but ours provided all food! We had access to the kitchen and pantry whenever we wanted to eat, and if there was something we needed, we just wrote it on the grocery list! We were quite hesitant to do that at the beginning. Greg and I normally made baguette sandwiches for lunch with blanc de poulet (chicken) and an assortment of cheeses, jams, and olives. There was always an abundant supply of baguettes. Each night, our amazing host prepared delicious homemade meals! This was amazing. She cooked everything from curries and paellas to crumbles and puddings. One of my favorites was fondue night. As she said, “When in the Alps, you must have fondue!” We definitely miss her nightly meals already!
Family nights, weekend getaways, good times!
The evenings were spent together as a ‘family,’ listening to music, putting dishes away, playing Uno, eating crisps, and drinking tea. On our last night, we cozied up in the loft and watched Jurassic Park on the new projector screen. We truly enjoyed making friends with them and learning about each other’s cultures and experiences. Between all of us, we have backgrounds from Scotland, Spain, England, Nigeria, Ghana, and of course, America. Cultural exchange was one of the many great aspects of this experience.
Amazing sunset views!
We spent the afternoons doing personal/business work and saved the weekends for exploring. I spent my afternoons working as a virtual nurse mentor, practicing French on Duolingo, and organizing photos. Greg spent his time managing AirBnB properties, working on Connect Travel Adventures, and planning our weekend trips and travels between Workaway assignments. We both did some reading from the many books they had available! Of course, there was time for napping and Netflix, but we tried to keep those at a minimum.
Whether it be sitting on the balcony or going on an adventure, we spent a lot of time outdoors. We hiked to Doran Refuge, Tornieux, and across the river to the waterfall. Each provided special views. We took a weekend trip to Chamonix, which we absolutely loved! Stay tuned for a blog post that will dive deeper into these experiences.
Thank you to our lovely hosts for making this experience so enjoyable!! Merci beaucoup!
