2022 Bed-hopper of the year award

I keep a schedule of where we sleep. This year has been a really big year for us, in terms of doing a European Housesitting tour. But we also managed an extended visit to family in South Africa, as well as me walking parts of the Camino in Spain. I started counting how many beds I’ve slept in this year (no dirty minds, please!). Or perhaps I should say: under how many roofs I’ve slept this year.

I am currently on 73! And another 7 or so planned until the end of the year, which will bring me to 80 beds this year. Wow. This is a wholesome mix of housesits, airbnb’s, hotels, family homes and long haul airlines…we only spent the first 8 nights of the year at our own home, before starting our tour in January.

What’s your total, can anyone challenge me?

PS. I got the idea from my favourite movie, called ‘The Big Year’ - a movie about birders counting their bird sighting for one calendar year as part of a competition. It’s with Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson. A lovely light film, with great bird shots.

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80 different beds in 52 weeks? Wow!! I need a nap just reading that! :grinning:

We are full-time sitters so haven’t slept a single night in ‘our own bed’. We did get a few sits that were a month longer, so sits combined with visits to family and hotel nights in between, I’d say 30-35 different beds this year…

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I keep a calendar on all our past and future sits but I have never actually counted. We change the place around every 10-15 days so I would think that we would average around 30 beds per year. But we have both had 3 months sits as well as 4-5 sits during around 10 days (we also do parallel sits sometimes as we are also professional sitters). 80 beds is definitely impressive and I just had to calculate that real quick (365 / 80 = 4,6 days per bed!). We don’t use Airbnb / hotels too much, have rented out or own flat and also avoid overnight travel, so we usually sleep in a home with a pet that we take care of.

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I couldn’t possibly count but probably not that many. However, some years ago I travelled around the world with my backpack for a year and was on the move every 2-3 days (couldn’t do that now!) so definitely would have exceeded your figure. For ages afterwards I would try and remember all the rooms!

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80 is quite a number. I was curious and searched my calendar. Our “bed-total” from sits and in-between hotels/B&B and a few for a holiday is, for me impressive enough, 31 pillows :slight_smile:

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I got carried away when I gave a total earlier and counted twos year worth! - I thought it sounded a lot as our house sits tend to be 2-4weeks.

I just re-counted and from Jan -now we have slept in 21 beds

2 Hotels :heavy_check_mark:

5 Airbnbs :heavy_check_mark:

14 Housesits :heavy_check_mark:

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Thank you all so much for sharing your totals - 30-50 is definitely a lot too!

Just to reiterate, it was a very special year for traveling for me in particular. Apart from housesitting in several European countries and traveling between sits, there were 3 additional tours:

  1. We visited South Africa for 12 weeks and did move around a fair bit to maximise our time there and see many places and a few safaris.
  2. My sister came to visit me in Europe, and the two of us traveled through Italy and Switzerland by train - we generally only stayed 2 nights per place, she shares my appetite for hopping around; and
  3. I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain for 14 days - this means you walk 20-30km each day and sleep in a different place each night. This definitely added to my total.

Housesitting this year: ‘only’ 11 sits over 157 nights, which means an average time of 14 days per housesit. This is more to hubby’s liking!

Hubby’s total is about 60 beds - I’d rather not tell him, as he definitely wants more slow-madding than no-madding! It’s his crazy wife that runs the program :laughing:

@Smiley I know what you mean! In 2006 did a 14-day bicycle tour and for weeks afterwards, I would run through my program (in my head) and name the places I spent the night - but that’s now all lost in my brain somewhere over the year :slight_smile:

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@Colin you make me blush - about the amount of money we likely spent on accommodation - I single handedly helped the economy this year :melting_face: I should have shares in Booking.com and Airbnb. But hey, as I said, it’s a special year.

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I enjoyed “The Big Year,” too. It didn’t hurt that Rashida Jones and Rosamund Pike were in it. =)

I can’t beat your record, but I did spend 107 days this year going around the Western U.S. via train. I would spend 2–3 nights at friends’ places, but also there were some Airbnbs and overnight trains. I probably slept under 40 roofs? I’m including train roofs. =)

I’m actually an introvert and like staying at home, so that trip was an outlier.

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In 2018 we traveled the world for slightly over a year and our stats were:

Countries Visited: 30

New Cities: 100+

Guided Tours: 88 (mostly free walking tours)

Different Beds: 110

Flights: 34

Trains: 82

Buses: 85

Boats: 58

Islands: 23

I should mention that my husband is really keen on tracking all this sort of stuff on our travel spreadsheet (which is so important to keep while traveling full time to keep track of everything). I hardly ever share these stats because I think it puts the wrong value on what travel means for us. Travel for us isn’t about bragging rights or how many countries we’ve been able to check off some list…it’s about widening our horizons and learning as much as we can about the people, cultures, histories and beauty of our world. There’s no number for that…it’s not even quantifiable. Travel by default brings us closer together and unites us with people and in our case pets too (which we’re all the richer for).

So I share these numbers knowing that you all get it…keep on exploring and building bridges it’s what we all need more of.

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But did you manage to do that on such a hectic trip?

It might appear to have been a hectic trip just my looking at those numbers but there were times where we were in the same place for a month sometimes more. We like to visit small towns/villages but it’s absolutely possible to see everything in a day or two while still deepening the appreciation of a culture and learning more about the people and history. It’s definitely a travel style that isn’t for everyone but when we look back on it there’s not a single place I would have removed and not have wanted to visit. The beauty about having done this while we were still fairly young is that we can always return and many of the places I’m sure we will return to. I’ll put it this way…I’ve been to Las Vegas NV, USA three or four times and one time was more than enough for me…for other people they like to visit several times a year. We all have our own styles of travel but I think many of us here on the forum share the same desires to learn, see, do and eat where and when we can however we can. I’m not saying I could write a thesis on every city I have visited but I have real memories that I can muster up with the smells, sounds and conversations with locals that we had. so I guess this is just a long winded way of saying yeah…I think we did manage it but there are certainly ways we could have done better as hindsight is 20/20

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Slow-madding is a great term that I’m definitely gonna steal!
I’ll have to check my spreadsheet to see the number of beds we’ve slept in this year.

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As of todays date, 9th November we have slept in 60 different beds this year. A mixture of pet sits, airbnbs and home.

Loving our life.

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Well I’ve consulted the data, and we’ll close out our year of full time travel with 63 beds! I’m not including long haul flights because they definitely aren’t beds, but we might do an overnight train in Vietnam later this month which would bring our total to 64.
Of those 63, 15 were housesits (got one more in December), 2 were friends places, and the rest were hotels, hostels, and airbnbs. We spent about 5 months traveling and 7 months housesitting, so there’s definitely been peaks and valleys.
Hoping for at least half that next year! I’m tired!

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I am SO impressed, spreadsheets, data +++ keeping records and logs :clap: :star: I just cannot conceive having yet another part of my life fully documented so I will live in awe of everyone’s super efficiency and talented organizational skills while keeping the memories of beloved pets in my head and heart.

I did look up the official definition of a “Bed Hopper” I think it’s a “little different” from what we are talking about in this conversation :joy: :flushed:

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To be fair, my extensive data is simply a list of housesits I keep on my phone (because I don’t have the ability to keep them in my head) and a spreadsheet of paid accommodation because I’m curious how much we spend on flights and accommodation. Those are the only things we track, so it’s not much maintenance. I don’t think I’d be able to do much more!

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With you there. I haven’t even owned a bed since I can’t remember when, more than a decade :joy:
Been nomadic since before it became “fashionable”.
It is just the way it is, no need to keep track either.

and to add, (surprise) every bed I have slept in has been mine for the night.

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Good for you

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You beat us. We’ll only have managed about 53 moves this year. 25 house-sits.

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