06/02/2020
House Sitting in the Age of Coronavirus
We've held out writing this post to allow for more time to pass giving us better insight as to how this pandemic has affected us and the house sitting community as a whole. Now that the world is slowly opening it's eyes, we think it's a good time to reflect on the impact and give some insight to anyone who may be considering house sitting.
For the past year two years, Jim and I have been away from our home in Panama. We found someone to rent the house while we were gone and our intention was to go on some bike tours, help with some family stuff and house sit while being able to visit friends and family. We were able to accomplish all of that until...da da dun!
When the virus hit the US, we were in Hood River Oregon, close to Jim's family. We had a great time for 6 weeks sitting with Howie the cat, in a beautiful home and enjoying all Hood River has to offer. After Hood River, we had a 3 week sit in Seattle. By his time, things were getting kinda crazy, but restaurants were still open and we enjoyed our stay. Our next sits were in Tennessee, Illinois, Panama, Wisconsin, Florida and Colorado. By the time we left Seattle and stopped at our storage in Wisconsin to swap our wardrobes, states were starting to shut down. Eager to get to Tennessee we left Wisconsin with warm weather clothes feeling grateful that we had a nice long term house sit near Chattanooga. But one by one, all of our house sits cancelled. In Panama, the airport was shut down, leaving our tenant stranded in Panama and us stranded in the US. It all happened so quickly! This left us essentially homeless. By this time we were in Tennessee with a minivan full of camping gear, so we thought we'd ride out the storm at one of the many beautiful parks. Nope! All parks shut down within 3 days of our arrival. Our only option was a KOA in the middle of nowhere. We ended up finding a small Airbnb with a mini fridge and microwave. We spent our time eating frozen lasagna and instant oatmeal, along with the occasional curbside pick up of bad Mexican and to go margaritas, woot!
It's pretty inconvenient to be a house sitter during a pandemic, but it's not likely to change our lives in a major way once it's over. I suppose that the novel coronavirus pandemic is like a 100 year flood. We could scrap the whole idea of being nomads and wait for the next pandemic to arrive in 5, 10, 50 or 100 years, or we can move ahead with our plan to see as many of the porches the world has to offer while we can. That being said, we are among the lucky ones. We have the resources to be able to pay for an Airbnb. We also have family who, while they may not like it, would let us stay with them. Many house sitters don't have either option. And we've heard some pretty sad stories of people being stranded, homeless in foreign countries or living out of their cars.
The best advice I could give to others is to be sure that you have the resources tucked away somewhere, so that you can either buy a last minute plane ticket home or get a short term rental. This virus isn't the only risk out there; earthquakes, floods, fires, tsunamis and more can all wipe out a carefully planned house sitting schedule. But, while there is some risk in putting all your eggs in the house sitting basket, this (hopefully) rare event, won't deter us. We are travelers at heart and don't see that changing any time soon. So stay well and travel far, but have your contingency plan in place and keep your sense of humor.
