If you’ve been following our blog for any length of time, you know that our family of four has been living on our 40-foot sailboat since 2016. In 2022, we cruised in Mexico, ending in August in the northern end of the Sea of Cortez at Puerto Penasco. From there, we planned to return to the Pacific Northwest for a few months to visit friends and family. And, we had decided to see what traveling via housesitting could be like for our family.
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This is Bailey from our Portland, Oregon housesit with Trusted Housesitters in September 2022.
What do I mean by Traveling via Housesitting?
I doubt there’s any official definition for ‘traveling via housesitting’. When I use the term, I’m simply referring to a person or family that travels from place to place without paying for accommodation. Instead of paying for a place to stay, we stay in the home of somebody looking for a caretaker for their home and/or pets while they’re on vacation.
I have a long and winding history of house- and pet-sitting which started when I was a kid. I was the neighborhood girl that took care of everybody’s pets when they went out of town on vacation. When I got older, I turned that into a side business and did it professionally for several years.
In 2020, I came across a site called Trusted Housesitters which connected house- and pet-owners with people that want to housesit. You have to pay for a membership, as an owner or a sitter, and the site provides support (24-hour veterinary chat lines) and insurance and security benefits. We signed up as a family with the idea that we might do an extended petsit during the winter of 2020-2021. (By that time, we’d done five Pacific Northwest winters living aboard and we were ready to enjoy the comforts of a house during the rainy, cold season…)
Our Experience Housesitting Together as a Family
I put a lot of thought into our first application and it paid off with an acceptance. Our first housesit would be in Seattle, WA in February of 2020. It seemed that it would be good to test out the platform on a short, local housesit. Long story short, we had a blast! We spent a weekend in an amazing, vintage Seattle home with a cute dog and cat. Everything went great for our first sit as a family, and we were really excited for the potential opportunities on the horizon for housesitting together as a family.
Then, Covid hit… and so much for that winter getaway that we had hoped for.
Then, in 2021, we sailed from the Puget Sound and down into Mexico and moved on with our sailing lives. But, at some point in early 2022, I remembered Trusted Housesitters and my scheming brain started the wheels turning again.
I brought up the idea of traveling via housesitting to my husband and asked if he would be interested in renewing our membership with Trusted Housesitters? Maybe using housesits as a means of traveling from place to place with free lodging? He was open to the idea, though we both knew there would be a lot of logistics involved. The more I thought about it, the more I started to crave the idea of challenging myself to see how I could string together housesits to cover longer periods of time. And I began dreaming about traveling internationally via housesitting.
Below: Coco, the dog, and Abby, the cat – from our September 2022 housesit in Burien, WA
Fast-Forward to Our String of Housesits in Late Summer 2022
From August through mid-October of 2022, we were based in the Vancouver, Washington area with family. In early September, we started applying to some petsits to see what I could string together. Below, you can see, in colors, the dates that we were housesitting versus, in white, the dates that we weren’t. Keep in mind, I wasn’t actively trying to fill ALL of these dates because I did want some time free to visit and stay with family.
We were able to be somewhat flexible with our dates, and I think this would be key for traveling via housesitting. Taking our housesitting schedule into consideration, we left the Vancouver, WA area on November 4th to head south. We knew that we wanted to get back across the border to Mexico, to return to our boat, in late November or early December. So, I had most of November to try to fill with housesits as accommodation as we traveled south from Vancouver, WA to Phoenix, AZ.
As you can see, I was able to fill the whole timeframe that we needed from November 5th through November 27th. We were able to work out border crossing to line up perfectly with the end of our Phoenix housesit.
Looking Forward to a Future of International Travel via Housesitting
So, after a solid test run of six different housesits over the course of three months, we are encouraged and definitely think that the idea of traveling via housesitting is a valid option. Our boat plans, for the next few years, at least, don’t include traveling further abroad than Mexico. We think that spending 6-8 months each year on the boat cruising, and 4-6 months each year traveling via housesitting, could be a winning equation for our family.
Eventually, we would be really interested in traveling internationally in this manner. There are a lot of housesits available in Europe, especially the UK, and a lot in Australia, too.
One thing that boat life has drilled into us, is the ability to live with flexible plans. Go with the flow of life and travel small. I’ll have to write another article about the pros and cons of housesitting. And maybe what it takes to be a successful housesitter. When I do, I’ll update this post with links.
I hope you’ve found this post interesting. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions! I’d truly love to help! ~Rachel
One more time: CLICK HERE to use our referral link to sign up for Trusted Housesitters. You’ll receive 25% off your membership price plus you’ll support our family with 3 months of added service on our membership. Thank you!
Here, our daughter Kali snuggles with Ori. Our family fell in love with Ori in our Bend, Oregon housesit in October of 2022.