When Anne joined Trusted House-sitters it seemed like a good way to justify our accommodation by looking after a house and animals for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to travel.
Some people kennel their animals, others have a neighbor take their pet or stop by to feed and let their animal out. Some find someone who they can trust to house sit and give their animals a great deal more attention than a kennel or neighbor might.
The downsides of this option is that our stays are not usually long - maybe a week or 10 days at the most, aren't all in the same area and you really can't string them together to cover a whole long period. For example in this trip we had to travel 3 and then 4 hours away from where we were based to do two house-sits in-between AirBnb rentals and a generous offer by my cousin to stay at their house while they are off adventuring with a friend in North Africa.
In each case these were in places we wanted to visit anyway so for the price of petrol we had accommodation and an opportunity to care for furry things.
You have to be a little careful when you volunteer to house-sit because some pets are extremely high maintenance and you need to be aware of the warning signs if you want to avoid really difficult sits. Anne has this down to a fine art, making sure we limit applying to sits with large numbers of animals and looking for signs that their animal care routines are within tolerable limits. For example a dog that barks at other dogs on walks is tolerable, but dogs that have to be kept separated in their house and walked separately might be a red flag for a relaxed house-sit.
Our experiences have ranged from people who happily skip phone screening before accepting our offer to sit (or skip meeting us at their homes before leaving for vacation), to people who carefully vet us, interview us and take an hour or so to show us the routine with their animals. Any of these approaches are fine, of course, and I suspect if we were looking for someone to care for an animal of ours we'd be on the more careful than carefree side of screening before we left them to house-sit.
On the whole our experience with house-sitting has been really good. We have sat pets in Spain, New England, Cornwall and Portugal since we started traveling and have really enjoyed it. In total over the last year we have done around 6 or 7 of these sits and they have almost all been great.
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| Sculpture depicting a legend involving a deer's fall over the cliff and the newer tradition of surfing |
Our house-sit for this week is in the town of Nazaré about 75mi (122km) north of Lisbon (90min by car). It took us close to 4 hrs to drive there from Lagos in the Algarve.
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| View of the headland from our house-sit. Whitewater is where the big waves form. |
We have been looking after a little young dog and an older mid-sized dog. The mid-sized dog is chill but the little one occasionally goes insane when it sees other dogs in the vicinity. There are also two fairly chill cats in this household. On the whole the younger dog is pretty manageable because she loves people so is very cute to be around. The condominium is up on the hills outside of Nazaré and close to an isolated country road that we have been able to walk along every day without coming across any other people with a dog thus avoiding the "crazy dog on a leash" experience altogether.
We did take the older dog to the town beach one morning on a day that the younger dog was in doggy day-care and just avoided exposing the younger dog to other animals altogether.
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| Nazaré town and the town beach |
Nazaré has become really famous over the past 10-12 years as a location that has the biggest waves in the world. The town has two beaches, Nazaré beach and North beach. North beach is where the massive waves are, when they come. Someone we met in Lagos who grew up in Nazaré told us that as a young girl her mother would not let her go to that beach because of their fear of the big waves and the backwash.
There is a unique undersea canyon just off a headland near the town, which channels the water. On ideal days, when wind-driven swells and local currents arrive together with this up-welling of water you can get peaks in the ocean really close to the headland that reach heights of over 80ft.
What amazed me about this is the shape of the waves. When you witness big waves from ocean storms you expect to see waves that are more or less of even height, but these are like peaked mountains.
This is the time of year that these mountainous waves usually arrive at Nazaré. The highest ever surfed at Nazaré (so far) was in October 2020 with predictions that at some point in the future there will be a surfer who surfs a 100ft wave here.
I was amazed at how crowded the little fort was while we were there on the Saturday. The waves were big enough to attract a couple of surfers, with their jet-ski teams, who briefly tried to surf.
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| A surfer on a wave - around 6 times the size of his crouched body |
I was particularly interested in finding the spot where the photographer was standing who took the iconic image of Sebastian Steudtner and to figure out what size zoom lens he had used to get some of the foreground of the fort into the image. The fort in the foreground gives a sense of scale and distance, comparing the people on the roof of the fort with the tiny surfer on the massive wave.
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| 200mm lens from the hill behind the fort |
We were not disappointed at all.
In fact the only thing that was disappointing on the day was discovering that I don't much like Alheira, a Portuguese sausage made of a mixture of meats and breads that I boldly ordered for lunch. The texture and taste both surprised me.
I guess you have to try something twice before being sure so I'll have to try visiting Nazaré again sometime (and maybe take another bite of an Alheira sausage as well).
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