We began our last minute-ish excursion to southern England at 3:30AM. E-frickin-gad. This allowed us to get cleaned up and repack the few things we’d used while being in a sleepy state and still get down to breakfast just as it opened at 4AM; one of the benefits of a hotel that caters to airport commuters, they know why people stay there. This requires no explanation if you’ve been in Portugal for awhile, but breakfast was mostly pastries. I swear these people; we love ’em, but would someone please show them a sausage patty or something? Then followed one of the biggest surprises we’ve had in travel in quite some time. Cliffhanger!

Not much of one, though. The big surprise was that we had a perfectly smooth travel experience, from checking in with Ryanair in Porto to collecting our bags and finding the shuttle bus in Bristol. Everything was smooth, no weird delays or ridiculous extra steps in the boarding process. Heck, we even had gangways(!) although, to be fair, since we were boarding from the back of the plane we actually went down the stairs and walked across the tarmac to get to the back steps on the plane. Still, we’ll take it! Heck, we even had our “leave the middle seat empty and maybe nobody will take it” strategy paid off for once. Score! And so it was that we made our way to the train station in central Bristol, from whence we would scoot out to where our car rental spot was.

This is where the shockingly smooth portion of the travel ended, although it wasn’t really a nightmare or anything. We mis-read which side of a minor highway the agency was on, so we walked 5-10 minutes in the wrong direction, turned around, got to the crosswalk and then got to the right side of the highway. Then there was the vaguely industrial-park vibe to where the rental agency was – it was Hertz, but I think most of their trade was long term van rentals. Put it this way, we were the only people who even vaguely looked like tourists in there, and rolling our bags along just completed the picture. Nevertheless they were lovely folks there and we were gone in no time with our hybrid (woo!) Toyota Yaris thingy. An hour or so later and we were in the driveway of our new, temporary, home in Dursley. I don’t think we’ll be sharing any pictures of this place, because I see way too many social media posts from clever dicks who can figure out where you are from almost no evidence and, well, it’s not our house. No reason to scream “the owners of this home are gone for a month!” to the internet.

So, we settled into our new digs for August. It is charmingly, well, normal. Suburban bordering on rural – not sure how locals would describe it, but we’re in a classic developed residential area (winding streets, a lot of houses that look almost identical), and we’re 5 minutes from cafes and shops, but we can also look in 3 directions and see sheep farms and rolling hills. Anyway. We met Oberon (Obie for short), the resident cat. Like most cats, after an initial “who are you what’s going on I want nothing to do with you” it became clear to him that we were the source of food, water, and the stick with the jingly ribbon on it and now we’re on the “ok” list. You can tell that we don’t play with the toys properly, but any port in a storm as they say and he grudgingly gives in.

The next several days have been us slowly figuring out what our rhythm for this trip actual will be. This was mildly complicated by the fact that we had talked past each other a little; this is what we call it when we’ve had what seemed like a thorough conversation about something only to find out that we still thought we heard something different from what we were told. Once we figured out the pace that we actually wanted to move at and were in agreement on, it locked in nicely. Granted, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.

We said we were looking forward to this because the weather reminded us of Seattle in April or May. Well, yeah. As if to hold up a sign that says “be careful what you wish for” our first trip out, to Lacock Abbey where there is (we are told) a lovely garden, was rained out. Like, we haven’t forgotten how to be in rain, but it was coming down hard enough that we watched visitors who were dressed for rain walking out of the place in large clusters. Literally, we pulled into the car park and John turns to Lisa and says “we’re going home, right?” and she says “yep, we’re going home.” So, another hour or so through the English countryside.

It hasn’t been all bad, though. We had a lovely sojourn to Painswick Rococo Garden which, aside from its normal loveliness, does a “fairy walk” during the summer where they sprinkle little wicker-esque fey folk all throughout the gardens. It really is a charming touch and sends you hunting around all the nooks and crannies. It is privately held as opposed to being part of the National Trust; this isn’t a bad thing per se, but the Trust-managed properties have a certain spit-and-polish to them that the private sites often do not, although that can lead to charming quirks as well. Like, well, wicker fey.

Tomorrow we begin a new phase of the trip, journeying farther afield than we’ve been going, with planned trips to Bristol and Cardiff as well as a southern jaunt to Avebury and Stonehenge. Knock on wood!

If you’ve been following along with us on a regular basis you’ll remember a very recent post about some changes, small ones, in one we’re putting on the Ramble and how we’re going about doing things re: travel in our lives. We (ok, mostly Lisa) spent some time explaining how we’d wanted to use house/pet-sitting as a way to instigate travel with some budget relief. Well. For any of you that are fans of “The Secret”, vision boards, or just plain magic, our hats are off to you. About three weeks ago we (ok, mostly Lisa) set up a new profile on a website that focuses specifically on the United Kingdom and matching home-havers (renters can do it too, I think) with people willing to watch those homes. Within a couple of days(!) we had multiple solicitations for homesits. The second-most promising one was a week on the western coast of the UK but it was, frankly, so last minute that we’d be canceling dinner dates and other meetups and it just seemed too rushed. The most promising one, however, gave us a little more time to prepare; and so prepare we have.

By now you may already have a couple of questions, starting with “what’s a Dursley?” Other than a familial name in those kid magician books, it is a charming little… hommlet? village? let’s go with “town” for now… in the southwest of England. A very nice couple of mixed English and American extraction are leaving old England for New England to visit family for a few weeks and they want someone(s) to look after their 8 month old kitten. Yes that’s right, the mission should we choose to accept it is to play with a kitten. Spoiler alert: we accepted. [Editor alert: clearly they didn’t have grammar check on their typewriters or that Mission: Impossible line never would have made it past draft form.] And so it is that later this very day we are hopping a ride with Orlando (if you know you know) to a hotel adjacent to the Porto Airport so as to catch a flight in the morning to Bristol.

Oh yes, Bristol. One of the things about housesitting is that it can actually be very competitive if you have a yen to visit any of the world’s hotspots. People in London have no trouble finding housesitters, in fact they are usually spoiled for choice. The websites that cater to these arrangements have become popular enough that you can see dozens of application fall in for sexy locales. However, if you’re less picky and/or actually want to see more of the world than just the capital cities, it turns out it isn’t all that hard to make the arrangements. To be clear, there are no global attractions of note in Dursley; a search for “things to do in Dursley” comes up with a number of interesting things starting at about a 30 minute drive from town. That said, if you give yourself a driving radius of about 90 minutes you get things like Stonehenge, Oxford University, and Cirencester (home of the amazing Chedworth roman villa). So yeah, we don’t just walk out our door and trip over UNESCO world heritage sites, but neither do we have to work all that hard to see them. And before it sounds like we’re dismissing Dursley, the town itself is lovely, and quiet and… oh, right! The average temperature in August runs about 15-20 degrees cooler (Fahrenheit) compared to where we live in Braga. Oo, and it’s rainy, too! To a couple of Seattle transplants it sounds just divine.

Today is, as the title says, Day 0. As of this writing we don’t actually know the first thing, first hand, about where we’re going. What we know is that the people seem nice, there’s a kitten named Obie (short for Oberon, in case we weren’t sure if these were our kind of people) who doesn’t know that they are waiting for us, and that against a terrible first impression from a year and a half ago (time flies!) we are once again putting our fate in Ryanair’s hands starting tomorrow morning. For now, it’s a slightly anxiety-inducing day of waiting for things to get started. We are packed, we have no plans because we treated this as a travel day, and so we watch the hands glide across the clock-face. (“You still have clocks?” Shut up.) This will be a whole different kind of adventure for the next three weeks, so let’s discover it together, shall we?

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.