Am scris ceva despre asta în română aici.
A few years ago, Mark discovered a website called trusted house sitters.
I am writing about it during the pandemic, so things might be different now, but that was our experience of a few years ago.
The concept is very advantageous for both pet owners and pet lovers. People who want to go on a holiday, but they have pets that they can’t take with them, they leave the house and their pet to be looked after; and people who want a holiday in a new area, are staying for free in a house and having the benefits of looking after an animal (you need to love pets for that).
Taking our example, we were both working very long hours, we both love pets and dogs in particular but couldn’t have one because it would have been unfair for the dog to be left alone in the house for the entirety of the day. And we love travelling and I have a particular fondness for France (but the concept is popular in many countries already).
So it worked perfectly! Mark created a profile, you do need to pay an annual fee, but it’s not that much and you gain so much more by staying for free in amazing houses and beautiful areas. We were mainly going to France for around 1-2 weeks looking after a dog each time (but you have a big choice of countries, period and types of pets to look after) and it helped that I speak French as it was an advantage during the selection process. Sometimes we would have a Skype interview as well.
At first, I didn’t know what to think of it. It seemed too good to be true. But after our first experience, meeting amazing people, we went to two other places on 2 different occasions and we were contacted by the same families if we ever wanted to go back, to let them know. In fact, we did go back to one place and we would have gone to all of them, but just didn’t have time. Because you develop a relationship with the house owners. They were all super nice to us and offered so much help: from picking us from the airport, leaving their spare car for us to use for free (insurance included), leaving food in the fridge and letting us use the fruit and vegg from the garden; to taking us to the fête du village, where we met locals, had nice food and drink together, I even met a lady that lived in the neighboring village and she invited me at her house for a coffee and a free lesson of pastel painting. We always had a meal together with the families when we arrived; and when they came back from their holiday, we prepared a nice meal for them to say thank you. Usually Mark was cooking a main and I was making dessert.
We weren’t constrained to staying in the house either. Of course, you need to learn the pet’s routine and you feed them and walk them at certain times. But you make your own schedule around that so we managed to go to very nice places in nature around; did kayaking; visited a beautiful cave and saw paintings that dated 12.000 years BC (see more about it on this article); visited places where Van Gogh used to get inspiration from; went to nice restaurants for a menu du jour , where we would get a lot of food for a very decent price.
It is a beautiful and extremely cheap way of having a holiday and you end up making new and very interesting friends. I mean, their life stories are just incredible! I don’t think I can publicly disclose it, but we met extraordinary people. And very sweet dogs that we miss all the time (that’s another alert: you might get attached to the pets).
If you ever tried a similar way of traveling, do contact me so that we can share impressions.
A bientôt!
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