June 15th, 2017
First House-sitting Experience
Port Washington, WI
About
Camrin has a cousin named Eryn who was in need of a house sitter. We said yes. The timing was perfect. We had a week to kill between our test trip and actually leaving for adventure. And we are interested in doing some house sitting over the next year and thought it could be good practice.
Eryn and her family live on a few acres with aprox. 35 chickens, 2 dogs, 1 fish, and a garden that all need looking after. We have never looked after chickens before so we were eager to learn how to care for them. We spent four full days at the house and it was our last chance to do our final prep for our trip, fix our brakes again, and eat all the eggs we wanted.
Overview
We found chicken sitting to be pretty easy. You let the chickens out of their coop at 6 am, make sure they have food and water for the day, and they know when to go back in their coops at night so all we had to do was close the coop doors. The chickens are obviously used to people feeding them because as soon as we would go outside, a bunch of them would come running over to see us.
The dogs, Seamus and Sansa, needed the most attention because they love affection. Laura became particularly close with Seamus who barely left her side all week.
Every day around 4 pm we would check the coops for eggs. We were finding roughly 12-14 eggs a day.
One night it stormed. We didn’t even know how close the storm was until we could hear all this squawking coming from the chicken coops. Laura went outside to check on the chickens and found they were all inside their coops early. That’s when she turned around, looked at the sky, and could see a giant dark cloud headed their way. She closed up the coops and the chickens were instantly quiet. Animal instinct, I guess.
Otherwise, it was a pleasant week. Camrin’s brother Johnny was able to work late one night and fix our brakes. We went through all of our gear and pulled the stuff we most likely will never use, and we started to plan the first leg of our journey.
