Things we have tried so far on this trip to save money:
- Volunteer at a hostel
- Stay with friends and family
- Hitchhike
- Haggling
It seems like the natural progression is then to have a go at some house and pet sitting. Months before we had left, we had lined up about 5 days in a town about 40 minutes outside of London called Baldock, looking after two dogs and some houseplants. One of the dogs was so lovely and easy, so were the houseplants. The other dog? Well, there’s a reason this is getting a blog post.
Let me introduce you to Jesse and Lyra. Jesse is an elderly Labradoodle who is pretty keen on food, pats, and naps. Just what you’d expect from an older Labradog. Lyra is a much younger Poodle cross something smaller, and is so highly sturng that you’d need to make some new euphemisms to fully describe her, cause she’s so astronomically off the charts. We were obviously warned she was an anxious dog, but nothing could have fully prepared us. So here’s our experience house sitting, by examining each of the things wrong with this dog.
1. She doesn’t like strangers
When we first arrived, we dropped out bags at the door and were instantly whisked away on a walk. Reason being, Lyra hates new people in the house, and is much more agreeable meeting people while on a walk. Fair enough I say, that’s her kingdom, her reich. Things is, being on a walk doesn’t fully eliminate her dislike of others. She still yapped and barked at me, plus, as soon as we got home, it got worse as I was now in her space. It’s not just me either. She was jumpy out and about with people wearing black, people on bicycles, kids, anyone walking without a dog. She particularly disliked men, which is topical in the social internet climate, but I still didn’t super appreciate as her temporary care giver.
2. Big time barking
This kinda ties into the last one, but she was a serial yapper, even once we did get to know her. Something about our, and especially my, presence flipped a switch in her brain. If I stood up off the couch too fast, I’d set her off in a barking fit. If I made eye contact or looked in her general direction as I moved about a room, she’d get set off. If we tried to feed her. If the curtains flapped in the breeze in a slightly odd way. One night she woke us up in the middle of the night with her barking. When I went to check on her, she was attacking the blanket we put over her cage, pulling it through the gaps and tearing at it. Trying to fix it of course led to her then barking at me, and after letting her outside for a wee, getting her back in the cage with some food induced even more barking. Honestly, this little dog was some of the most fantastic birth control, cause waking up a few times in a week was already nuts, I couldn’t imagine doing it full time for years.
3. Strange toilet behaviour
I’m sure most of you have seen girl dogs and boy dogs take a wee. Usually female dogs do a little squat, and males cock a leg to wee on something in particular. Lyra, a small female dog, weed exactly how you would expect a male to wee. I’d never seen it before, it was so bizarre. On top of that, she would also do her number 2s exactly the same way. It was so frustrating cause you wouldn’t know if she needed to wee or poo and whether to get the bags out until after she was done. The cherry on the cake was depositing her goods into the dog bin during the walk. For some reason, she was absolutely obsessed with the dog poo bin. She’d get all hyper when you start walking towards it, and she’d get up on her back legs like a meerkat when you tossed it in. She never tried to get into it or eat it or anything gross, but she was just so excited by it, we had to pull her away each time. Well, she didn’t eat her own, or anything other dog’s, only Jesse’s. So we had to keep her away from that too.
4. Hose addict
Through some miracle we found a way to tire her out in the end. As Milly was watering the garden one day, Lyra went absolutely feral for the stream of water. She ended up chasing it around the backgarden for ages as Milly strung her around like a cat with a laser pointer. She would have chased it until she collapsed, soaking wet, so we eventually had to shut her inside to get the watering done (though a wet dog in the house causes its own problems). However, it was great to have a surefire way to sap some of the energy out of her, which thankfully made her slightly less jumpy and yappy.
I think that about covers it. It was really fine in the end, it was just weird and annoying to deal with. I’m so thankful Milly was there with me, cause she got on with Lyra a lot better. Without her to run interference, it would have been a much more stressful week. There were moments where it was almost super wholesome, Lyra would jump up on the bed and snuggle up with us, and even let me pat her, but as soon as I got up or looked at her she would hate me again.
We got up to lots of other stuff too, it was just a shame she was too jumpy to come with us for most of it. For example, we went down to the pub to watch the English Lionesses football team win the Europa League final. It was absolutely buzzing in the pub, everyone was yahooing and hollering. The pub was dog friendly and it would have been nice to take the dogs, but we just couldn’t trust the yapper in that environment. Or we went to Cambridge for a day, to have a gander at the town and check out the uni. We would have loved to stay all day and take it all in, but because we couldn’t trust Lyra to come with us, we had to make it a relatively short visit so we didn’t leave the dogs by themselves too long.
So in the end for the most part, our time house sitting was spent walking the dogs, playing board games, reading books, and making focaccia in a fully stocked and equipped kitchen. What a horrible way to spend a week of an English summer, right?