Recently, I took a road trip to Chicago with a friend where we stayed for free. No, I didn’t go on a service trip, and we didn’t stay with friends from school or relatives. Rather, we CouchSurfed.

CouchSurfing is an international sub-culture facilitated by the website www.couchsurfing.com. CouchSurfing was started in an effort to unite people from around the world to cut travel costs by opening up your home to fellow travelers, share knowledge of your home town and connect with people in a very personal and unique way.

My initial reaction to this concept was probably similar to most people’s when first hearing about it, “You mean, stay with somebody I don’t know who I’ve only seen a profile of on the Internet?” Well, essentially, yes, that is what you do. Sounds about as creepy as the Internet gets, right?

First of all, I highly recommend actually going to the Web site and checking it out, as there are security precautions involved (and a very apparent disclaimer that CouchSurfing is not a dating site.) To be honest, CouchSurfing, more than anything else, is a circle of trust between members who have stayed with each other and who know each other personally.

To become involved in CouchSurfing, like other networking sites, you are encouraged to make a profile. Then you search for people in the area of which you are traveling, send messages to members with whom you think you would like to stay (and who have a lot of positive reviews) and wait to see if they offer to let you stay with them. After staying with a fellow CouchSurfer, you are encouraged to write a review of the person, and to either recommend them or let the site know that they are not good members with whom to stay.

In my experience, CouchSurfing was safe, exciting and showed me different areas of Chicago where I wouldn’t have been if I had stayed in a hotel or hostel closer to downtown. The first night in Chicago we stayed with a single, hip 30-year-old named Lydia who took us into her duplex in the Ukranian Village West of downtown. She gave us a key and our own space, converted from an office into a bedroom with a blow-up mattress as our “couch.” Lydia was gracious and interesting, and though I was somewhat nervous when we first arrived, it turned out that staying with her was kind of like staying with a relative I didn’t know very well. Lydia even set up a brunch with other CouchSurfers from Chicago, which is really the unique aspect of CouchSurfing. Many of the members don’t necessarily stay with other members, rather they use couchsurfing as a portal to find other open, adventuresome people to meet up with in their own town.

And, refreshingly, CouchSurfing’s emphasis is actually being friends with the people with whom you are “friends.” In fact, I was denied a friend request on CouchSurfing.com by a guy I met and talked to for quite awhile at the brunch in Chicago, because he “felt like he didn’t really get to know me.” I wasn’t offended. In fact, it gave me more faith in the people who participate in CouchSurfing. Members actually want to get to know you, over coffee, maps of your city and maybe even in your living room.

CouchSurfing presents the opportunity to not only stay for free, practically anywhere in the world, but also to meet interesting, welcoming people who can present knowledge of their town in ways that you could not find anywhere else. You never know what you could gain from both hosting visitors and staying with others. In our case, Lydia sent us away with a home-made pound cake. It was delicious.