Shame about your sit in Hove as it’s a lovely town and spending a few weeks in the summer was great. We would have been interested in visiting the THS offices too. Maybe next year …,…
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It’s lovely seeing you back house sitting… I’m enjoying seeing your pix with pets on Facebook. We feel like we are winding down now in UK… sits are cancelling on run to Christmas, or talking about alternative dates, which makes things very difficult for planning. Our new “wave” here and regional lock-downs are going to cause some disruption for a bit, so we are going to step back (to the van) while we see how it all settles again. Just staying flexible as always!!
I have so much respect for you going back to work in the hospital … please keep yourself very safe x
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Hello @HousesittingMag. We are full-time housesitters and we were in USA when COVID hit. Luckily we were still able to find housesitting opportunities in USA. It might be less but there are still opportunities out there to housesit. We are also thinking of doing a vanlife soon so we’re starting research for some vans. 
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@maptheunknown whereabouts are you sitting? How are you managing to get around to line up sits in the U.S.? That’s the biggest challenge for us without a car and not wanting to fly to a new sit every time. So I’m curious how you’re managing!
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Hello @alternativetravelers,
We actually just left USA and we are now in Dominican Republic. We were stuck in USA for 6 months (March-August 2020) because of Covid. During that time we were able to find housesitting opportunities in Florida. We were on the TrustedHousesitter app everyday and we apply as soon as we find one that fits our criteria. I still see many opportunities in USA so it’s just a matter of getting on the app everyday and apply as soon as you can when you find a sit that you like.
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Ooh makes sense, yeah most of the house sits I saw were in Florida or California! We had applied to any and every sit that we could when all our house sits were cancelled back in March, and everyone that we talked to ended up going with local sitters. We also prefer to do long term sits (1-3 months) and there are just way fewer of those now, a fraction of what there used to be. So we decided to just rent a place for now and get back to house sitting full time next year. We have some repeat sits in the state lined up, so that will be fun. But yes, totally agree, when we are actively looking for sits, we live on the THS app and apply immediately!
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We’ve been a bit quiet in here over last week but are now on day 5 of our van life break. So far so good. We researched LOTS of different van options in terms of length, width and how much we could fit in (we wanted a full size double bed at very least), so if you want to run any questions by us just shout!
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@HousesittingMag Vanlife sounds interesting. Know a few people who permanently live in vans and always been interested in how they feel about it.
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In just a few short days we’ve met people of all ages who do live permanently in their vans or motorhomes… it’s going to be an interesting time I think discovering a new set of stories from a different type of traveler!
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Would love to get some ideas from you. I don’t know where to start haha Where is a good place to buy a van? What to look for and what’s a good price range? Did you buy a furnished one already or you did the conversion yourself?
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Hi there,
We have also been sitting full time for 5 yrs.
We are currently in the Algarve, having been here since lockdown in march.
Our hosts are traveling round Europe, sailing, and won’t be back until next March!
We were all lockdown until July 1st, very tricky but we didn’t kill each other!
We have had a wonderful time 
but do miss our family in the UK.
Hopefully all this madness ends soon.
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Welcome to our Forum community @portugal61 it’s great to have you here and we could think of worse places to be than the Algarve during lockdown, so happy you are safe and well.
We have a small “seasoned” team of community members here already, they were our amazing platform testers and have contributed some great content.
Enjoy the conversations and making new connections.
Happy Friday … and Happy and safe Halloween 
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@portugal61 Wow a year in the Algarve? That’s some housesit isn’t it? Sounds brilliant and fabulous timing for somewhere to be through these tough times.
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Great to meet you @portugal61, I laughed… You haven’t killed each other yet 
these are strange and testing times, a sense of humour is essential. Sounds a great Sit, love the Algarve. Stay safe.
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Welcome. We know quite a few people who have gone to either sit or rent in Portugal. We thought about heading there too in the van, but we’ve taken a long house sit (without pets) at a second home in France now to ride out the lockdowns and travel restrictions. Sounds like you survived your first lockdown well! It is all madness, I agree … and it’s likely to be a long winter! Hopefully Portugal can stay out of a lockdown and you can continue to enjoy the outdoors!
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Thanks, we’re quite proud of our blog. We are locked down here from Thursday but are still looking for somewhere to go.
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There is a contact page on the blog that will send messages directly through to us, might be good to use that
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I’ve been a house-sitter full-time for the last 7 years. As an Australian who found herself in Europe at the commencement of Covid19 I didn’t have any choice about staying as Australian citizens were refused entry back into Australia when they closed the borders. A bit of a shock to the many tens of thousands of Australians who wanted to go home. Fortunately I managed to secure excellent house-sits in good locations with some great animals for company. Most sits are now short term which does make it much more challenging for full-time sitters plus I’ve often seen over 40 applications for individual house-sits. I’m now set until next June so will ride out the worst of any lockdowns. I’m also fortunate to have dual citizenship although, of course, with Brexit looming, this will limit the amount of time I can spend in Europe in any one year. However, there’s a big old world out there and I’ll always be happy to discover new destinations and cultures as soon as travel opens up again. If you don’t mind living out of a suitcase it’s a wonderful freeing life providing a unique opportunity to live like a local and become a traveler rather than a tourist. TH makes all this possible.
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We are also normally full-timers. In the first lockdown we had just started doing some volunteering on a lovely family run glamping site in Norfolk. We were only meant to be there for 3 weeks, we ended up being there for other 3 months! The owners were lovely and offered us to stay and work with them for lockdown… have to admit it was bliss. We did a bit of housesittting in the UK once lockdown ended - we didn’t want to risk travelling abroad. But now that we’ve gone into the second lockdown in the UK we cancelled all sits and now are lucky that we can stay at Suze’s parents until we can housesit/travel again.
We are seriously tempted by van life - we did try out a van in October. It’s something that we’ve thought about for a long long time (way before Covid), and we think it still would make a perfect combination with housesitting!
We actually wrote a little about this on our blog - https://chrisandsuzegowalkies.co.uk/blog/travelling-during-covid-our-2020-housesitting-review
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