“Let me get this straight” I said to Heather. I wanted to be sure what we were getting into when we were accepted for our first international housesitting gig, which we had applied for through our membership in an online community that matches homeowners (in this case, Joan, an American ex-pat) with qualified house and pet sitters (us!) who are typically traveling. Heather had just finished a phone interview with Joan while we were back in Cocles, on the Caribbean coast.  I continued, “We’re staying at her two bedroom house in a gated community for twelve days, surrounded by forest that contains howler monkeys; we have to walk the dogs in the morning, then while they lay around during the heat of the day (which pretty much lasts from sunrise to sunset), we can take long beach walks and play in the surf with the boogie boards she’s left for us; later, after we’ve spent the afternoon at the community pool we have to DRIVE the dogs around the complex in Joan’s golf cart before we go back to the beach for sunset. Do I have this right?” “Yeah, that’s pretty much it” she replied. ‘Well, someone’s got to do it’ I thought.

Joan had given us our instructions over the course of the day and a half we spent together before she left on her trip. Spot and Chile couldn’t have been more sweet – or more lazy. They literally wanted to do nothing during the day after their morning walk and before their chauffeured ride in the late afternoon. The huge pool at the community center, along with the yoga studio and fitness center, were almost always empty, due to the fact that only five or six homes in the thirty unit complex were occupied. The beach at Playa Junquillal was uncrowded – on a Saturday visit we saw perhaps fifteen people along it’s mile-long strip of black sand. Lazing on the beach on the evening after Joan left, I remarked “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” I was watching another spectacular sunset (one of my favorite things to do and Costa Rica has some of the best I’ve seen – along with Hawaii and the Philippine island of Boracay) and Heather had just returned from her stroll down the beach to witness a release of Olive Ridley turtle hatchlings as they made their way out to the ocean to start their lives at sea (one of her favorite things to do). So things were definitely going well for us.

A week into our housesit and things are going well. We’ve gotten into a nice rhythm of rising early; feeding and walking the dogs; spending the morning doing trip planning for our upcoming segments to El Salvador, Mexico and Cuba; enjoying the pool and sunsets at the beach each evening, and going up to Tamarindo a couple times to shop for groceries and have a meal out. Joan returns on Sunday and we’ll head off in the panel van to another national park and another beach town down south for a week before leaving Costa Rica. We’ve also been communicating with folks about another upcoming housesit. Over Christmas, while we were back in Panama, we had applied for and been accepted to sit for a couple on the Big Island of Hawaii – for three and a half months. There we’ll care for their house on the southern tip of the island as well as their dog, Snickers. There will be beaches to visit, hopefully some paddling on our SUPs, island villages to explore and, of course, those killer Hawaiian sunsets. Someone’s got to do it.

Note: We use TrustedHousesitters to arrange our sits. If you’re interested in becoming a TrustedHousesitter, contact us for a referral that’ll get you a discounted annual membership.