Nice  to hear from you and I am glad you are safe and well.

Gets a bit boring having to read opinions that i agree with or not having anyone to disagree with me.

One big happy family again.

Whenarewethere wrote:

---

We had a close friend we new for decades & who sublet with us long ago. She had her own home but house sitted in Sydney. Unfortunately now is permanently house sitting above... or below! 

Once you build up the contacts you will have endless work & some seriously nice homes to sit.

---

 Yes, beforecovid lockdowns we were asked back again and again. But covid has crueled that now. You know what, i am with you mike, sure  is better living and doing what u want , when u want And answerable to  no one. Oh, well, except strop.

With a few different mosquito born diseases around at the moment along the Murray we avoided the area on a recent 3 week trip.

We love being by ourselves in the bush too, there's nothing like it.

Broken Bucket Tank for the 3rd time on our next trip, not many mozzies there.

We never started out to become house sitters or caretakers & when we discovered the joy of staying in one place for an extended period of time it was a revelation & has changed our travel patterns. Mostly our 'sits' have been in remote areas - just the two of us - just how we like it. Mostly wet season sits to provide us with a solid roof over our heads & indoor cooking. Living in a Tvan in tropical wet seasons would be no fun. Many folk seem ok with short sits of just days or weeks. For us it seems too short to bother with. The shortest we've done was 5 weeks - it suited at the time giving us a nice place to live in , in central Broome, and a chance to have some dog time, one of the things we miss most on the road. The longest - a farm sit for 'as long as you want' was a good place to sit out all the Covid travel restrictions for over a year.

Mostly the sits have been something we fit between mobile travel (we now differentiate between mobile & stationary travel :) ) and have never just been about being a 'place to park', almost all have been about taking advantage of opportunities we could not have whilst mobile, to experience different (to us) country & situations in greater depth. Until now we have never been keen on 'back to back' sits, but are currently coming to the end of another wet season caretaking 'sit' & will be moving straight to another not too far away (1 day's travel) for a 12 month period living deep in the rainforest in a modern off grid house built just 5 years ago. Too good to turn down. Not often the chance to be in such a diverse & dynamic but also oppressively bug ridden environment, within a comfortable indoor living space becomes available!

One thing about longer sits is that it gets around the sense of being an intruder in another's home. It really only feels like that close to the beginning & end - so perhaps another reason we are not keen on short sits. Power, water, & internet are our primary requirements, we have never sought payment but have been happy in our current situation to be provided with everything we need to live from loo rolls to tucker to fuel. 6 months here has been a great experience of seeing Cape York as tourists never do & has not cost us a single cent & to boot I have tractor & front end loader experience, RFDS med chest key holder approval, commercial size zero turn mower operating , generator management & servicing, ARO (aerodrome reporting officer) credentials to add to my capabilities, along with a fair bit of networking within the Cape's small but widely distributed population.

We had never come across house-sitting until we had a couple house sit the small farm we had at the time. They cared for it for 18 months like it was their own whilst we did our first lap of the country over a decade ago, even saved it during the Black Saturday bushfires. In many respects, whilst we obviously get something out of 'sitting' we have never lot the sense of 'paying it forward' that we also bring to each sit, and feel it is a great lifestyle & means of maintaining interest in our time on the road beyond just a holiday.