During a recent break home from school, a friend and I biked the east coast of Florida. Leaving our car in a Wendy’s parking lot, we began in St. Mary’s, a town straddling the Georgia border, and in eight days traveled 650 miles to reach Key West, the end of the panhandle and the southernmost point of the United States.
My friend, who I’ll call James, had never been down south before. “What is Bojangles?” he asked me. We agreed that Florida is beautiful in December—flat, cloudless, and so warm it feels sinful to have life so easy. The sun is shining, and everyone talks slower, but the real story is our experience with Warmshowers.com, an obscure internet community you’ve never heard of that makes adventures like ours possible.
Warmshowers is a hospitality website for people who love tour biking, connecting sweaty, tired road warriors on long, multi-day trips with other kind people willing to host them for a night. Though most popular (and most useful) in Europe and North America, tens of thousands of members are scattered in far-flung corners around the world. Supposedly there are 1,077 members in Iran, and at least 2 somewhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In our case, Warmshowers formed the skeleton of our trip. Knowing we could push ourselves 60-100 miles a day allowed us to search for folks in nearby cities—St. Augustine, Daytona, Miami—and plan our route depending on who called us back.
Unlike similar sites such as Airbnb, guests aren’t expected to pay. It’s difficult to believe, but for nothing more than our company and a few war stories about Florida drivers (the worst in the nation) we were given a place to shower, fed home-cooked meals, and given a living room sectional to sleep on. “There’s beer in the fridge, help yourself,” quickly became my favorite English phrase, and several times someone insisted on doing our laundry. After eight to 10 hours riding on a hard bicycle seat, pulling into a suburban driveway and being welcomed into someone’s home was an experience bordering on the religious. Considering our other options—camping in the rain or paying for a motel—made the hospitality we were shown all the more extravagant. And why? Because we, too, love biking for days on end.
If you, like my concerned mother, find something unsettling about staying with internet strangers, be reassured. Warmshowers makes clear that users are responsible for their own safety, and good judgment is advised. Members, however, are never obligated to let someone into their home, and are not required to provide any personal information other than a barebones address (city, state). Guests are able to provide anonymous feedback about their host, and vice-versa, creating a certain accountability. And whereas everyone has that friend of a friend who got hosed by a Craigslist deal gone wrong, Warmshowers had a safe reputation among all the bikers we met. Every year since the site’s conception in 2001, negative feedback has never totaled more than half a percent. In 2016, a ridiculous 99.29 percent of customers said their experience was positive.
It sounds clichéd, but our trip really was about the people we meet along the way. After biking an average of 80 miles per day, the idea of sightseeing was painful. Besides, I would’ve wanted to give my full attention to such riveting gemstones as the “Possum Monument” in Wausau, Florida. Instead, Warmshowers became the adventure, taking on a life of its own.
We met Henry, the former Marine and recently retired firefighter, who’s getting remarried and preparing to bike the Great Divide in his mid-60s. Imagine your grandpa, and un-disgraced Lance Armstrong. He was happy to host us, his extended family visiting from Connecticut, and his mother from across the street around the same dining room table. In Miami, we stayed with Caleb and his partner Sarah, the kindest, most textbook liberals you can imagine. They’re Bernie fans from Los Angeles. He’s completing his PhD dissertation on German alternative energy, while she keeps the experimental household afloat working for Planned Parenthood in third world countries. During our conversation, she corrected her partner’s patriarchal vocabulary, asking him to instead say “ovaries.”
Though Warmshowers was founded as early as 1993, the concept is hardly original. At a time when dozens of small fish hospitality travel sites, most especially Airbnb, are threatening the hotel industry, Warmshowers isn’t even impressive from a business standpoint.
Really, let’s be honest, it sounds like a hippie pipe-dream, something that shouldn’t work at all. There seems to be no incentive or mechanism to keep cheapskates from taking advantage of other people’s generosity. Frankly, though I’ve benefitted from the website enormously, it’s unlikely I will ever invite a biker to stay the night. Like many members, I’m nothing more than a user, a leech on the system.
Nevertheless, out of 82,000 members, more than half have profiles saying they are available to host. As the website casually explains, “All members agree to host others either now or in the future, but for some members hosting may be in years or even decades in their future.”
Still, the hospitality we were shown speaks for itself. Our hosts woke up early to make us breakfast before we hit the road, and Henry added our picture to his scrapbook. When I lost my “wallet” (a Ziploc bag of credit cards) in downtown Miami, it was a Warmshowers host who tracked it down and mailed it back to me.
The Warmshowers experience is a rare kind of hospitality unlike any other. It shouldn’t work, but it does, made successful by a close knit group of people who share a love of biking and meeting new people. There’s a fraternity between those who live to pedal the open road. Or, at the very least, the narrow shoulder of the open road, often littered with glass and roadkill, made terrifying by the occasional log truck passing at NASCAR speed.
