Long before we conceived of this new life as immigrants, we noodled on a different way to travel the world affordably by becoming semi-professional housesitters. The person responsible was the lady who took care of our house and pets for our honeymoon (hey Barbara! *waves*) and is herself a full-time housesitter. In fact, Barbara neither owned nor rented anything you’d call a “home”; she had a storage unit somewhere in the Seattle area that held stuff for her. Other than that she simply lived, constantly, in the homes of other people, usually with no money changing hands. She house/pet-sat for us several times over the years, and we’d get together at other times when she was doing a Seattle gig, so we had a chance to dig into the guts of what it takes.
Short version: it’s not easy, but it’s possible. Long version? Come along with us.
The first thing we knew is that we weren’t going to be able to just copy/paste how Barbara did things. We did not plan to be constantly on the move; a lot for sure, but there would still be a home base. Also, since we didn’t “have” to find a housesit just to provide shelter, we could aim to create different kinds of relationships. We needed to figure out what opportunities exist and how to get access to them.
Just to backtrack and fill-in our larger thoughts for a moment, what we were focusing on was that, now that we live in the EU, travel around this continent is fairly inexpensive, but lodging continues to be a huge expense. I mean, even in the off-season a small apt. in Paris or Rome or Berlin is more than $100/ day. Smaller towns are less, but not by much once you’ve paid the fees. And we’re old enough that couch-surfing or just getting a room in someone’s home is not to our taste.
That sounds like it might be complicated, but unsurprisingly technology is constantly moving forward. Back when we were looking for people to look after our animals, we used a clearinghouse site called House Carers. It’s actually a decent-looking site now, but when we were using it in the 2010’s or so it was about as scruffy as craigslist. Still, we had good success with the place, finding not only Barbara but also some lovely Australians who used House Carers to see the United States. The good news/bad news of the situation is that there’s a much snazzier site now called Trusted Housesitters. It’s a little spendier and a good bit snazzier, and they seem to do more to get the word out about themselves. The “bad news” half of this news is that it means there’s a lot more people who have cottoned on to the notion of subsidizing their traveling by trading house sitting for lodging.
What does that mean? It means that when somebody in Paris needs someone to watch little Fifi for a couple of weeks while they go to their daughter’s wedding, there could be dozens of offers to watch their little fluffball. yet when we posted our suburban house outside of Seattle we might get five offers, with a minimal follow-up resulting in perhaps two viable possibilities. Unsurprisingly, with this increased competition comes more sophisticated candidates. People on Trusted Housesitters collect reviews and create “About Me” pages that can rival the glossiest resumes. We saw that and realized we’d have to put some effort into getting out of the beginners’ bracket.
Fortunately, we can play the long game. There are a few ways, we’ve realized, that you can accumulate a track record. (Let’s take for granted that all of this presumes doing a good job of caring for people’s homes and animals; obviously if we screw that up this isn’t going to work and, besides, even one or two bad experiences caring for other people’s pets (O.P.P.? Enh? Never mind…) would probably traumatize us out of wanting to do it again.)
Our strategy is basically . . .
- Think global and act local. There’s a lovely community of immigrants right here in Braga and they a) include pet owners who, b), want to travel just like the rest of us. Just being friendly neighbors provides opportunities to help folks out and get some experience at the whole pet-sit thing. We’ve done it three times so far and it’s been a lot of fun. As most of you know we have had pets for many years and, currently being animal-free ourselves, getting a dose of kitty cuddlin’ and dog rastlin’ is pretty fun. It’s gone well, and we’ve had a chance to try a variety of situations already.
- Don’t be picky. We are curious to see … well, everywhere more or less. We haven’t started doing this part yet, but in observing the offers on Trusted Housesitters it’s pretty clear that the demand drops off when the housesit in question is in BFE. Turns out, even BFE (especially if it’s in literal “E”) can be interesting. We long realized that we don’t just want to see the famous bits of places; some of the most fun we’ve had has been in the backroads and byways, hunting down local attractions and just getting the feel of a place. So, we can (probably) build a review resume out in the sticks without too much difficulty.
- Be flexible with the schedule. We have the luxury of being almost completely the masters of our calendar. From time to time we’ll see people who have a last-minute need for help, either because of an emergency situation or maybe the care they arranged fell through unexpectedly. Just this past week, we looked after an adorable Italian greyhound (shoutout to @sammyloveshugs on Instagram!) for some friends whose original care plan fell through with like four days notice. Hey, we were going to be in Braga for those days anyway! It was a negligible impact of our lives and was a huge help to our friends.
- Moneyball! Ok, bear with us a sec. If you don’t know what Moneyball is or have only vaguely heard of it, it was this notion that now seems obvious in our data-driven age but was slow to come to sports at first: data analysis could reveal aspects of the game of baseball that were being undervalued or overvalued by teams when it came time to pay players. To be super reductivist, imagine if the data could show that every base stolen was worth, on average, 0.5 runs per base stolen, but when teams were offering contracts to players they considered stolen bases a negligible statistic. The team that knew this, if others didn’t, could offer modest contracts to players who were good at stealing bases because there was little competition for them, all the while getting incredibly valuable talent.
- What the hell are you talking about, clearly-John-at-this-point? Ok, here’s the thing. On the global stage, Portugal is not at the top of a lot of people’s lists of places to visit. That’s just facts, regardless of how much you or we like it here. This is even more true when you get out of Lisbon, Porto, and maybe parts of the Algarve during the summer. Now, we know that getting to spend a week in Coimbra would be hella fun; we even have a couple of favorite restaurants there. And yes, of course we’re not the only people on the planet who know this, but it’s still true that the demand on some really attractive housesits in Portugal don’t get the volume of applicants that they deserve, relative to what have appeared to be really crummy gigs in sexier destinations in France and Italy.
It’s early days and we’ve only nibbled around the edges of this plan. We’ll keep you updated on how it goes, but hopefully you’ll be reading about Rambles in the future where we’re taking care of a couple of Borzois in Austria or some such.
