This morning I noticed the back of Dave’s t-shirt thick with white cat hair from where Doris was sitting on the back of Dave’s chair last night, nuzzling against his neck. I know that makes it sound like we re-wear our clothes, we’re traveling light.
Dave and I are living the life we’ve talked about for a long time. After years of talking and reading other peoples’ stories, we finally did it. We left our work, our home, our family & friends and our daily comforts for a life of – animal hair.
Yes that’s right, animal hair everywhere. I even find pet hair on my laptop keyboard.
And you know, we could not be any happier about that.
Since mid 2015 we’ve been helping out home owners by looking after 14 homes, we’ve cared for 12 dogs, 13 cats, an aviary of birds, around 40 fish, a handful of chooks and a chinchilla in Australia, New Zealand, UK and Europe. Each animal with its own wonderful unique personality.
Thanks to house sitting Dave and I will forever have fascinating and hilarious stories to remember about all the different and delightful animals, lovely people, homes, towns and the vagaries of British plumbing. We’ll probably bore our family and friends senseless!
Our lives have been enriched beyond measure from spending our time loving and nurturing the much-loved pets of holidaying families. It means that we’ve made some life-long friends of homeowners as they welcomed us into their homes and trusted us to care for their precious treasures. And we meet so many friendly locals when we’re out walking the dogs. People stop to chat and show genuine interest in our fairly unique lifestyle.
We’re now at Week 32 since embarking on this new life and we’ve had almost back to back house sitting assignments, apart from the times we’ve chosen to travel “freestyle”.
We just renewed our trustedhousesitters.com membership for another 12 months. It is without doubt the most valuable investment we have made for our adventure retirement travels. Initially we felt nervous creating our profile and applying for house sits, but we did get through that, and everything just took off for us.
We have no plans of slowing down any time soon and we’ll be looking for travel and house sitting opportunities around the world through 2016 and beyond 2017. So it looks like the hairy life for us for some time. You really know you love a dog when you have to pick up its poo from the pavement. My coat pockets are full of little black plastic bag rolls, always at the ready. Pet hair and dog poo notwithstanding, we can’t wait for more.
Relaxing in the comfortable and cosy living room, I glanced across to the snoring animals and marveled yet again at how fortunate we are, being able to do this over and over again.
