Blake and Deborah in Europe: Gioiella, Umbria

While planning for this year's trip we discovered that house sitting assignments are hard to come by in Europe. The opportunities are out there but when you respond to an advertisement the homeowners reply that they have been inundated with responses from prospective sitters. Everyone wants to go to Europe. So in the face of this fierce competition it can be hard to land a choice assignment. At one point we had a five-week house sit in the Costa del Sol in Spain lined up, but the homeowners had some undisclosed personal situation come up that forced them to cancel on us. We are still trying to fill that hole in our schedule. Hopefully something will turn up by February.

To offset the dearth of house sitting assignments and still keep this trip affordable we are trying something new this year called “help exchange” that our friends Mark and Sandy told us about. Help Exchange (HelpX) differs from house sitting in that instead of having the homeowners leave while you look after their home and pets, the homeowners instead stay and you work with them (remodeling, painting walls, gardening, whatever) for 4 or 5 hours a day five days a week in exchange for room and board. The rest of your time you are free to do as you wish. The downside relative to house sitting is that the duties may be considerably more extensive than feeding the cat and walking the dog, but the upside is that you get fed by your hosts so your grocery bills go way down. It also gives you the chance to really meet and learn from others living in distant lands.

Given that the web site we use to find these opportunities (www.helpx.net) is an English language site, most of the HelpX hosts are American, UK or other typically multilingual Northern Europeans who are living abroad. Spain and France have the most HelpX hosts in Europe, but most countries have at least a few opportunities.

Our current situation with Jan is actually a hybrid house sitting/helpx, which offers either the best of both worlds or (more likely) the worst. She advertised on the HelpX web site, but mentioned that she was also looking for house sitters over the Christmas period when she planned to visit her daughter in the UK. We agreed to cover the house sit period of about a week and also stay an extra week or so to help out with various tasks around the house in exchange for room and board. We were originally going to rent a car for the week that Jan is gone to allow us to sightsee more effectively, but changed our mind since the weather wasn't looking too promising, we didn't really want to spend the money, and we felt we could use a low-key break anyway. Of course, since we are stuck at the house without a car while Jan is away, we ended up working on what should have just been house-sitting days. And in Deborah's case that has meant long hours. Deborah has it in her head to finish certain projects she discussed with Jan no matter what. She is lengthening and lining some drapes by piecing together existing fragments, painting furniture, reorganizing Jan's kitchen, rearranging the furniture, and of course still managing to fulfill her usual exemplary cleaning/cooking/pet-care domestic goddess function. My work hours and tasks have been more modest, including hanging curtain rods, fixing some kitchen cabinets, hanging a few things on the wall, walking the dogs, feeding the chickens (!), hauling wood and bags of pellets, building fires, etc.

Jan has promised to take us sightseeing on her return and I'm sure we'll be ready for it by then, weather permitting. I am happy to report though that the temperatures here have soared into the 50s F so it's feeling quite balmy now, and we are down to just two or three layers of clothing in the house. And I don't have so many fires to keep going. Luxury!