After our Townsville trip, in the March/April time frame, the vaccine rollout in the US seemed really promising and the vaccine rollout in Australia was just the opposite. Though Australia has done an amazing job keeping covid out of the country, they are in no “rush” to vaccinate people which is disheartening to me and many other people who have a wide variety of reasons for wanting to actually be able to leave the country and return without getting permission to leave, currently required for all citizens and permanent residents, and paying thousands of dollars for 14 days of hotel quarantine on return, also required, assuming you can even return given that arrival numbers are severely limited. Anyway, I’ll stop my rant before I get too riled up. Thus, our options looked to be staying in Australia until early 2022 if we wanted to get vaccinated here and then travel back OR travel back sooner with the idea that we’ll get vaccinated the day after we arrive. The latter was the best choice for us and we were able to get approval to leave since we plan to be gone for more than 3 months.

With lots of house sitting experience under our belts, to rave reviews I must add, we turned our attention to finding a longer house sit to allow us to transition out of our apartment and then travel back to the US. Jon found just the ticket in a Brisbane suburb, nearly 5 weeks with just 1 dog. A super cute old doggo, Honey. We started selling or donating everything we didn’t have to have as quickly as possible and, once we moved out on April 13th, put the rest on sale. We had a lot of difficulty getting rid of the last few large items, but Jon got them all taken care of one way or another. It involved numerous drives back and forth at an hour round trip to do so, and I am very grateful to him. Jon also found us a top rate rental agent who found us renters as soon as we put the apartment up for rent. They moved in on May 1st and so far things seem to be going well or at least we haven’t heard otherwise!

At some point earlier in the year, Jon committed to doing another house sit at the house we first sat so we knew we needed to be here to do that and through magical luck the nearly 5 week house sit finished just as this one started. Now we’re back with Nelson and Kelsey and all the birds for a week. Once we finish here, we’ll head down to Sydney over a few days, get our required covid test within 72 hours of departure, and hopefully depart on our first flight since January 2020 on May 27th. We loaded up on N95 equivalent masks, hand sanitizer and wipes and booked appointments for our first Pfizer shot the next morning.

We’ll be laying low at my mom’s house until we’re fully vaccinated and then getting out and about to see everyone we’ve been missing so much over the past 1.5 years. We’re going to miss lots of people and things in Australia, but we’re super excited to get back to the US for a good long while.

Given that we were planning on coming back to the US for an indefinite period of time last April, we wanted to be prepared to move back as soon as we felt it was covid-safe enough for our risk tolerance. Jon came up with the brilliant idea to do some house sitting as both a way to cure our wanderlust and to potentially have a way to transition out of our apartment to either rent or sell it before heading back to the US.

There are numerous websites for house sitting and Jon signed us up for 2 Australian ones to get started. We did our first house sit at the end of October 2020 and as luck would have it we’re doing our last house sit (for now) in the exact same place, more on that later. This house sit also includes taking care of a menagerie – 2 big dogs, 4 chickens, numerous budgies, and 3 parrots. It was pretty full on for our first adventure. Since we normally have just ourselves to take care of and that’s plenty to do thank you very much, we felt very accomplished managing to keep all the animals watered and fed for a whole week.

Our second house sit allowed us to get out of our place for Christmas and New Years. We only had to take care of 2 dogs this time, Lucy and Benson. We enjoyed lots of time on the beautiful front deck with the occasional dip in the pool to cool off. If only we’d remembered how everything shuts down on holidays in Australia. We were caught off guard when the only place open for take away on my birthday was swamped and wouldn’t be able to provide dinner for over 1.5 hours. Luckily we had enough food to scrounge together dinner at home instead, so much for a celebratory birthday dinner.

On Saturday mornings, we often do parkrun, a free timed 5K available in numerous locations around the world. Our local run was at Kedron Park, but since we were house sitting we decided to do a more adventurous trail run at Bunyaville. I was a little apprehensive about doing a trail run, but decided to go for it and got rewarded with the most scrapes and bruises I’ve had since I was a kid. Stupid me went full speed down one of the first hills and found myself on the ground wondering what happened. I managed to pick myself up and “run” the rest of the race finishing in my worst ever time of nearly 40 minutes. Live and learn, or something.

We were excited to be chosen for our third house sit in a house on the beach in a small town north of Townsville, Toolakea Beach, in February 2021. This time it was 2 dogs again, Emma and Brick (aka Boof). Given the distance from Brisbane, about a 16 hour drive, we decided to do the drive over 2 days and tack on a bit of a vacation to Magnetic Island off the coast of Townsville. Magnetic Island, or Maggie, was absolutely gorgeous and mostly deserted so we felt like we had the island to ourselves. We did some amazing hikes and relaxed by the pool and the beach before heading off to do our hard work house sitting.

Emma and Boof were the most energetic dogs we’ve watched which is impressive given the energy levels of Nelson and Kelsey. We took them for a super long walk every day on the beach and tossed the ball to them endlessly. They never grew tired before us. The actual water was off limits to us due to it being peak stinger (the deadly box and irukandji jellyfish) season, not to mention the year round risk of crocodiles and we had to be sure not to forget to keep any eye out for snakes when walking around. Oh Northern Queensland, you certainly know how to get me out of my comfort zone! Fortunately, the house also had a pool which we enjoyed daily.