16 Day, 1579 Kilometre, Road Trip Through New Zealand South Island, including Fox Glacier, Queenstown and Milford Sound

We completed the most amazing 1,579 kilometre road trip through New Zealand’s stunning South Island. Taking in iconic sites as we drove from Christchurch through Arthurs Pass, down the west coast past Fox Glacier to beautiful Queenstown. Heading further on to Te Anau and Milford Sound, before headingback up to Lake Hawea and Wanaka, through Central Otago and back to Christchurch.

We’d like to share the journey with you, including all the costs to complete the trip which we hope may inspire you to follow our route or some of it taking in some of the most outstanding natural beauty, iconic sites and scenery New Zealand’s South Island has to offer. Please note we took the trip in 2023, so please consider this when looking at our costings as they may well have increased since then, but it should give you a guide at least.

Summary of the all important total cost for the trip (We’ll break these costs down within the blog for each leg of the journey)

Return Flights (We flew from Sydney to Christchurch for £350 and returned Christchurch to Melbourne for £480): £830
Car Hire: £325
Accommodation: £870
Petrol: £250
Sightseeing Tickets: £225
Food: £400

Total Cost: £2900 (£2070 Without Flights)

Trip Dates: 22nd February to 10th March 2023

A few general tips about our costs:

Flights: These were booked with Air New Zealand who provided a comfortable Flight both ways. We flew from Sydney, Australia as we had been visiting before our trip to New Zealand, we flew back to Melbourne in Australia as the was our next destination to explore!

Car Hire: We booked this really early when Car Rentals were offering up to 25% discounts. Great thing we found was that upgrading to fully comprehensive and extra driver was just £69. Worry free car hire as they call it. Keep your eye out for the bargains as car hire in New Zealand can be pricey!

Accommodation: Book as early as possible and always on free cancellation. We couldn’t find better prices than Booking.com and nearly all rooms could be booked and cancelled for free, giving us the opportunity to swap accommodation if a better deal comes up nearer the time, which it did on one occasion. Sign up with them and after booking with them for a while you will gain genius status with regular offers of up to 15% discounts, free breakfast, room upgrades and cool stuff like that! We researched our accommodation well, wanting the best prices but with good reviews on cleanliness, comfort and either an en-suite or our own room with shared bathroom and kitchen! All our accommodation was brilliant and we’ll list and review them individually further in this blog.

Petrol: We estimated we would spend £250 on fuel and this was pretty much spot on.

Sightseeing Tickets: We only had one sightseeing trip we really wanted to do and that was a boat trip on Milford Sound. But when we got to Queenstown a cruise and BBQ buffer was recommended by a friend who said it was brilliant (especially the food). I have to say that it was amazing food and worth every penny. It was an extravagance on our budget but faultless and the food was absolutely incredible. We would so recommended it if your budget stretches that far and you love food!

Food: This definitely deserves a mention as everyone will have different ideas about a food budget. We can only tell you about our needs. Our total food budget for the trip was £400, that’s roughly £25 per day. Now, in New Zealand you wouldn’t get an evening meal in a bar for less than our daily budget. Here’s how and why we only spent this much.

How we spent this amount: We purchased a fold up cool bag, bought most of our food from supermarkets on route and kept food cold with an ice block we purchased. We also made sure we only booked accommodation that had a fridge and microwave on site or in the room. We only ate out once and that was a takeaway at Ferberger in Queenstown, the rest of the time we made use of motel microwaves or made up our own picnic meals and ate overlooking the lakes and mountains. This certainly isn’t for everyone, but we have travelled like this before, through Thailand and the USA, making our limited funds go further while always eating healthy (Julie saw to that). We can honestly say that we never felt hungry during the 16 days and we even managed to have at least 10 takeaway coffees within our budget! We did have quite a few microwaved potatoes, salads, tinned tuna and sardines, bread, fruit, cereal and yoghurt, we did ok!

Why we spent this amount: Simple really, to save money – which you get to spend on other things. As a result of the saving, we were able to pay for 3 nights accommodation in Melbourne! From where I am presently writing this blog. It’s the only part of our budget where we could actually save money and our view is that if we have to go without a few treats of big meals in restaurants to allow us to see another city then its well worth it!
It won’t be everyone’s view and some people couldn’t manage it, but we are more than happy to give you advice or share our tips on this in greater detail. Just get in touch.

This is the route we took with accommodation in Springfield, Greymouth, Fox Glacier, Queenstown, Te Anau, Lake Hawea and Christchurch.

On route visiting Arthurs Pass, Hokitika, Franz Josef and Fox Glacier, Mount Cook, Lake Matheson, The Blue Pools, Lake Wanaka, Queenstown and the Remarkables, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Lake Hawea and Lake Tekapo.

Day 1

We arrived at Chritchurch Airport at 3.30pm after a three and a half hour flight from Sydney with Air New Zealand costing £350 one way for 2 tickets.

Tip: Make sure you have access to a pen on the plane as you need to fill out an arrival card and be prepared for a 1 to 2 hour queue to get through security on arrival!

We collected the hire car costing £325 for 16 days and headed off to our first nights accommodation at Springfield, 45 minutes from Christchurch Airport (Take Highway 73).

1 night stay at Smylies Accommodation priced at £51 for the night (we had a studio apartment)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Kitchenette, Free Parking, Free Wifi

Day 2

Left Springfield and continued our drive across Highway 73, passing through Arthurs pass.

Unfortunately the weather was cloudy for our drive across from East to West but I think the views would have been great on a clear day.

Arrived in Greymouth at 4.00pm. Greymouth is a fishing town with a small selection of shops and restaurants and a large supermarket. Mc Donalds and KFC also available.

1 night stay at Noah’s Ark Backpackers priced at £38 for the night (We had a private double room with a shared bathroom. (Communal kitchen and lounge areas).
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Communal shower facilities OK, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Communal kitchen was very well stocked with cooking equipment and utensils. Lots of seating areas and the lounge had TV. Highly recommended for the price.

Day 3

We left Greymouth at 9.30am and headed south on Highway 6 towards our next accommodation at Fox Glacier. We planned to stop at Franz Josef on the way and walk up to view the Glacier.

The drive to Franz Josef took us just over 2 and a half hours with a stop at Hokitika on route. The car park for Franz Josef Glacier is very large and even at 12 noon we easily got parked. The main view point was about a 20 minute walk for us. When we got there we read that the view point is shorter as the path had been washed away further towards the glacier. There was another hike that took you much closer to the glacier following the other side of the river. It was a bit spontaneous but we decided to give it ago. The first 45 minutes of the walk was fairly strenuous with a couple of really cool suspension bridges to cross. It then got pretty difficult and in our view is only really suitable for experienced hikers. The view of the Glacier is pretty good from the view point, but personally I was more impressed by Fox Glacier.

We headed back to Franz Josef for a coffee and watched the helicopters buzzing around taking tourists up to the summit.

From Franz Josef it was about a half hour drive to Fox Glacier and our accommodation.

2 nights stay at Mount View Cook Motel priced at £148 for the 2 nights (We had an Executive Studio).
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Very nice modern bathroom with walk in shower, Kitchenette perfect for cooking a chilli, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi. Good location for Fox Glacier and the Mirror Lake. Highly recommended.

Day 4

We had a full day at Fox Glacier, we had read that the best time to see Lake Matheson Mirror lake was early in the morning, so we headed there for 9am. It was only a five minute drove from our accommodation. Lake Matheson has a visitors centre and café, the lake walk is a circular path and its definitely worth getting there early as the light is best. We were really lucky with the weather as the lake was pretty still and we got some pretty decent photos.

The added bonus at Lake Matheson is the café. Really good coffee and a brilliant view to go with it. The café does food too, we couldn’t afford it but plenty of tourists were tucking in to some good looking breakfasts at about 25 NZD a head. Not bad prices for the location!

Tip: Getting to the Mirror Lake early in the morning is well worth it and the coffee after the walk is highly recommended at the café.

We headed to Fox Glacier for the afternoon walk up to the view point. Plenty of free parking at the start of the walk, the walk itself was an easy one with a nice path. It took us about an hour to walk up to the view point.

On the way back to the accommodation we headed further along the road passing our motel and further on passed the entrance to Lake Matheson continuing for about another half a mile, the road comes to an end and if you turn right along a gravel road after about 200 metres you come to a view point for what I think were some of the best views of Fox Glacier. The Glacier is further away but you get a great view of the length of the Glacier. The drive back along the road to the accommodation also gave us more great views of the Glacier. This particular view point doesn’t seen to be mentioned in many online articles but I really think its well worth a look, but you really need a fairly clear day to see it at its best.

Day 5

We left Fox Glacier at 9.30am on Highway 6 on route to Queenstown. Its a pretty long 4 and a half hour drive but the scenery as you get nearer to Lakes Wanaka and Hawea are quite spectacular. On the way we stopped at Ships Creek and saw a pod of Hector’s Dolphins (one of the worlds smallest species of Dolphin).

Tip: Its well worth lathering up with insect repellent as the sand flies can be really bad on this part of the west coast. They really were, as I was bitten a number of times that day without realising it and only started to notice the itches that evening (Itchy for a week too).

After numerous stops to view waterfalls as the road meanders along Haast River and a stop at the Blue Pools, we reached the top end of Lake Wanaka. The views were breath taking and even more so as we drove down past Lake Hawea. We continued the drive down to Queenstown passed Cardrona (there is an old hotel there which is a popular photo stop. Look out for the Bra Fence in the village too, it started in 1998/99 and now has 100’s and 100’s of bras on it. There is a collection box on site with the proceeds going to the Breast Cancer Foundation. A very worthy cause.

We arrived at our accommodation on the outskirts of Queenstown at 6.45pm

3 nights stay at Blue Skies Guest Accommodation priced at £221 for the 3 nights (We had a Studio).
Review: We Would Rate This As Excellent, Really Comfortable Bed, Lovely and Clean, Very nice modern bathroom with shower. Kitchenette with microwave and fridge, Fresh Bread, milk & Cereals left for us. Daily Housekeeping, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi. TV with Netflix. Good location for Queenstown (10 minute drive or catch a bus at the end of the road). Lovely owner. Really Highly recommended.

Day 6

A full day in Queenstown. We had heard that parking in Queenstown can be a bit of a nightmare, so we opted for taking the bus in to town. Its a 30 minute bus ride in to town and there are great views of the lake on the way.

Tip: If taking the bus they only take cash on board. Consider purchasing a Bee Card if your staying for a few days. The rides are cheaper and you can top up the card and simply tap on and off the buses. The Bee Card is also accepted in a few other parts of New Zealand such as Dunedin. You can buy the card on the bus and load the card with a few dollars on the bus to. You just need to pay cash for the card and the top ups. You can also pick up Bee Cards as some shops around Queenstown.

We spent the morning exploring Queenstown, walking through the park and round by the lake watching the pretty cool Hydro Attack Shark Boat Rides and Jet Boat Rides, stopped for coffee and watched the Skydivers giving tourists the ride of their lives.

In the afternoon we treated ourselves and had pre-booked a boat trip on the TSS Earnslaw with a Gourmet BBQ lunch at Walter Peak. Its a pretty cool trip as the Earnslaw is an old coal fired steamship, the only one steamship operating in the southern hemisphere. You can take a look in the engine room and see the coal being shovelled into the boilers and all the engines and pumps working. There are superb views of the lake and surrounding mountains as you make your away across the lake to Walter Peak. A friendly welcome awaits you by the staff as we made our way up to the restaurant and what was one of the best BBQ lunches I’ve ever had. A superb range of high quality starters, followed by beautifully cooked thick slices of beef, belly pork and crackling, local sausage, roast chicken accompanied by roast potatoes, an assortment of vegetable dishes and sauces and dressings of all kinds. A variety of incredible deserts including individual sticky toffee puddings, sorbets, cakes and luxury moose. If you still have room there are local cheeses, biscuits and chutneys. Table water is provided and you can buy alcohol at a reasonable price.
Review: Absolutely Excellent. The food was by far the highlight of the trip and I’d go again just for the food. Lovely boat to have a trip on the lake. Chargeable Bar on board, also serving soft drinks. Plenty of space to wander round and look at the engine room. Superb BBQ lunch in a beautiful location down the lake. Bonus of a sheep sheering and sheep dog demonstration after lunch. Really highly recommend the trip.

Day 7

A full day in Queenstown.

We’d read about being able to buy tickets for the Queenstown Gondala that takes you up high above Queenstown. But this was a bit pricey for us, so we opted for the climb up Queenstown Hill to the Basket of Dreams, the views are OK but we saw a path that takes you high above that point and the views are incredible. It looked as if we were a little higher than the the top of the cable car station on the next mountain, so I think we had just as good views as the paid option. Its quite a hike but the views are so worth it.

Later that day as a reward for our efforts we went to Ferburger, a must do while in Queenstown. The queue was OK while we were their it only took us 5 minutes to place our order. We’d read the queues can be really long. We went for the “Mr Big Stuff” – 3/4lb of prime NZ beef, cheddar cheese, streaky bacon, bbq sauce, lettuce, tomato, red onion & aioli!
Review: Simply put – “Sublime”. We tried to work out how we could afford to go again!

Day 8

We left our Queenstown at 9.30am for the two and a half hour drive to our next destination of Te Anau. On the way out of town we headed to Miles Better Pies for a mid morning treat (Mint and Lamb for me and Steak and Cheese for Julie).

Tip: For any of you that like a pie, here is our personal Review of Miles Better Pies v Ferbaker Pies. Miles Better Pies won, we found the filling much more meaty and the pastry better! Don’t take our word for it however! Ferbaker Pies are handy as they are located in Queenstown centre, Miles Better Pies are located a 10 minute drive to Frankton. (Well worth the drive though!

Our route took us down Highway 6 along the shores of Lake Wakatipu, we stopped at Coffee Bomb in Garston on the way.

Tip: We picked up some cheap fuel for the car in Mossburn in March 2023, the price was more than 20 cents a litre cheaper than Queenstown. Saved a few dollars on a full fill up. You can only pay by credit card as it a self service set up.

We arrived in Te Anau at around 3pm. Its a nice little town by the lake with plenty of restaurants a couple of supermarkets, petrol station and lots of accommodation options.

4 night stay at Parklands Motel priced at £210 in total (We had a standard studio – ground floor)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Use of Communal Kitchen, Paid Laundry Room on Site. Very happy with the accommodation at the price we paid.

Day 9

A full day exploring Te Anau. Lovely walk around the lake from Te Anau town centre, purchased some groceries from the local supermarket. Nice coffee shop overlooking the lake called “The Lakefront Cafe”. There’s also a Miles Better Pies in the town too!

Day 10

We’d pre-booked our boat trip on Milford Sound for today, so we made an early start for the 1 and half to 2 hour drive to Milford Sound. Some really stunning scenery as you get a bit closer to Milford.

Tip: As you arrive at Milford Sound there is a large car park just off Deep Water Basin Road offering free parking about and easy 20 minutes walk from the paid car parks which are located at the information centre / Cafe. This will save you the 20 dollars for 5 hours parking fee. That’s three “Miles Better Pies” in real money!

Our Pure Milford Premium Milford Sound Cruise was booked for 3.30pm. We paid 109 NZD per person for the 2 hour trip (4th March 2023). We felt the later boats would be less busy due to the many day coach tours leaving Queenstown would be booked on earlier cruises. This was confirmed by the reception desk on arrival at Milford Sound as they also said that Milford is much quieter around 3pm as the bus tours depart on their way back to Queenstown and Te Anau.
We had beautiful weather for the trip and brilliant views of the surrounding mountains. Apparently the best time to see Milford Sound is in the rain and there are lots more waterfalls on show and its quite spectacular and a unique experience.
Review: Great Trip. Comfortable boat, not over crowded, plenty of viewing space, good commentary, friendly staff.

Day 11

We just had a relaxing day in Te Anau today as our trip had been pretty full on so far. A chance to do a bit of washing, catch up on some emails and plan our next few days ahead.

Day 12

We left Te Anau at 9.30am for the drive back to Queenstown (just over 2 hours) and then on to Lake Hawea (about an hour and 20 minutes). We found some free parking quite easily in Queenstown and had our lunch overlooking the lake. On the way out of Queenstown we stocked up with groceries.

Tip: Head out of Queenstown a couple of miles to Frankton, you’ll find 2 large supermarkets, Countdown and Pack n Save. Countdown was only slightly more expensive than Pack n Save. you’ll find Miles Better Pies are located in Frankton too!

On the way out of Queenstown we visited the town of Arrowtown. A quaint little place with a look of an old gold mining town. We headed back up in to the mountains passing Cardrona and its historic hotel and restaurant. Look out for the Bra fence too! Driving further we passed Wanaka and arrived at our accommodation in Lake Hawea around 6pm.

3 night stay at Hotel Lake Hawea priced at £111 in total (We had a double room with shared bathroom and kitchen)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness reasonable, Free Parking, Free Wifi, Use of Communal Kitchen although a little basic. The bathrooms and toilet block were in a separate building outside of the hostel rooms (not advertised like this). We booked a room with shared bathroom as accommodation was pretty pricy in this area. We’ve stayed in much better and well equipped hostels. It was OK for a couple of nights or so, but we’d stay in Wanaka next time if we could afford to. Location was still great though, right on the lake.

Day 13

An early start this morning to climb Mount Isthmus (1385m). Its the rival to the popular Roy’s Peak climb at Wanaka mentioned in most blogs. The Mount Isthmus climb is a tough one but with stunning views of both La Hawea and Wanaka from the top.

Tip: We recommend taking plenty of water on this climb along with lunch. It took us 7 hours in total to the top and back.

In the late afternoon we headed back to our accommodation and a swim in Lake Hawea.

Day 14

Today we took a drive in to Wanaka and strolled along the promenade to the Instafamous “That Wanaka Tree” also known as The Wanaka Willow” and back along the main street stopping for coffee at one of the lake front cafe’s.

In the afternoon we took a scenic drive along the Lake passed Roy’s Peak and headed towards Mount Aspiring National Park. The scenery is stunning! We ended our day back in Wanaka with fish and chips on a bench over looking the lake. “Living the Dream!”

Day 15

We left Wanaka early to take the scenic 5 and a half hour drive up to Christchurch, taking highway 8 up to Lake Tekapo and then over to highway 1 for the rest of the drive up to Christchurch.

Arrived at Christchurch early evening and checked in to our motel.

2 night stay at 53 Southern Comfort Motel priced at £111 in total (We booked a Deluxe Suite)
Review:

Day 16

Full day in Christchurch. Visit to the Botanical Gardens in Hagley Park, lunch at the Riverside Market, wander along the river bank and read about the history of Christchurch including the 2010 earthquake. Visited the Art Gallery.

Trip Summary

Total Miles Driven: 1405
Total Cost of Trip: £2070 ($4060 NZD)
Trip Highlights: Franz Josef Glacier, Fox Glacier, Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Lake Wanaka, Lake Hawea, Christchurch
Trip Dates: 22nd February to 10th March 2023

Thank you for visiting our Blog, we would really appreciate your comments, your thoughts on it, or your experiences to share and if you have any questions. There is a comment box at the end of this blog page and we will be so happy to get back to you, to answer and to give any help/advice we can.

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3 and a Half Months in New Zealand South Island – Travelling on a Budget!

Check out our travel blog of the South Island New Zealand on a shoestring budget. We managed three and a half months of exploring pretty much the whole of the South Island costing a total of £6165 GBP (Approx 12306 NZD) excluding our arrival flights and departure flights to and from New Zealand.

Highlights: Fox Glacier, Franz Joseph Glacier, Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Wanaka, Lake Hawea, Christchurch, Picton, Abel Tasman National Park, Kaikoura, Akaroa, Dunedin.

We’d like to share our epic adventure with you, including all the costs to complete the trip which we hope may inspire you to follow our route or some of it taking in some of the most outstanding natural beauty, iconic sites and scenery New Zealand’s South Island has to offer. Please note we took the trip in 2023, so consider this when looking at our costings as they may well have increased since then, but it should give you a guide at least.

Summary of the all important facts and figures for the trip

Costs:

Food: £1510 (Approx 3025 NZD)
Accommodation: £2490 (Approx 4995 NZD)
Car Hire: £1204 (Approx 2423 NZD)
Fuel: £460 (Approx 920 NZD)
Trips: £495 (Approx 930 NZD
Public Transport: £15 (Approx 28 NZD)
Internal Flights: £90 (180 NZD)

Total Cost: £6264 (Approx 12515 NZD)

Please Note: We have not included travel insurance in the total cost (as we have a worldwide policy because we will be travelling to other countries). Quotes for travel insurance our individual, you can find many companies offering reasonable rates online. We have also not included our arrival and departure flight costs as we actually can from Sydney and flew back to Melbourne in Australia.

Trip Dates: 22nd February to 28th May 2023

Route Map with accommodation in Springfield, Greymouth, Fox Glacier, Queenstown, Te Anau, Lake Hawea, Christchurch, Kaikoura, Picton, Nelson, Akaroa, and Dunedin.

On route visiting Arthurs Pass, Greymouth, Hokitika, Franz Josef and Fox Glacier, Mount Cook, Lake Matheson, The Blue Pools, Lake Wanaka, Queenstown and the Remarkables, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Lake Hawea, Lake Tekapo, Mount Cook National Park, Christchurch, Kaikoura, Marlborough Wine Region, Picton, Nelson, Abel Tasman National Park, Akaroa and Dunedin.

Christchurch to Greymouth (23rd to 24th February 2023)

The 240km drive from Christchurch to Greymouth is a great start to any journey taking you along the scenic drive across from the East coast to the West coast through Arthur’s Pass National Park

Accommodation in Greymouth was Noah’s Ark Backpackers priced at £38 for the night (We had a private double room with a shared bathroom. (Communal kitchen and lounge areas).
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Communal shower facilities OK, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Communal kitchen was very well stocked with cooking equipment and utensils. Lots of seating areas and the lounge had TV. Highly recommended for the price.

Greymouth to Fox Glacier (24th to 26th February 2023)

Taking the road south from Greymouth for 195km brings you to Fox Glacier leaving in the morning it should take 2 to 3 hours, which still leaves you enough time for a half day visit to Franz Josef Glacier view point before heading on to Fox Glacier village. We stayed 2 nights in Fox Glacier which gave us an extra full day to visit Fox Glacier view point and the beautiful Lake Matheson Walk (Mirror Lake). We recommend viewing the Lake early in the morning for the best mirror effect.

Accommodation in Fox Glacier was at Mount View Cook Motel priced at £148 for the 2 nights (We had an Executive Studio).
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Very nice modern bathroom with walk in shower, Kitchenette perfect for cooking a chilli, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi. Good location for Fox Glacier and the Mirror Lake. Highly recommended.

Fox Glacier to Queenstown (26th February to 1st March 2023)

This is a full day of driving, although its only 330km the roads can be fairly slow and the scenery is absolutely stunning. Make time for stops along the way as you head along the coast. The scenery really changes when you reach the north shore of Lake Wanaka with fabulous mountain backdrops and clear blue waters. Most people might consider staying in Lake Wanaka or Hawea to break up the journey, but we had plans to come back to Hawea so headed straight for Queenstown. 3 days in Queenstown really wasn’t enough for us. We hiked up to the basket of dreams, took a cruise on the lake with a BBQ lunch, strolled along the streets, tried the popular Ferburger, walked through the park and along the lakeside. There’s so much to do here!

Accommodation in Queenstown was at Blue Skies Guest Accommodation priced at £221 for the 3 nights (We had a Studio).
Review: We Would Rate This As Excellent, Really Comfortable Bed, Lovely and Clean, Very nice modern bathroom with shower. Kitchenette with microwave and fridge, Fresh Bread, milk & Cereals left for us. Daily Housekeeping, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi. TV with Netflix. Good location for Queenstown (10 minute drive or catch a bus at the end of the road). Lovely owner. Really Highly recommended.

Queenstown to Te Anau (1st to 5th March 2023)

The 170km drive takes you along the shores of Lake Wakatipu from Queenstown and then heads across the countryside towards Te Anau, the closest town to Milford Sound and with a great selection accommodation to suit all budgets. We were lucky enough to have four nights in Te Anau which gave us a full day at Milford Sound for our boat trip and a couple of days to do some hiking around the Lake at Te Anau.

Accommodation in Te Anau was at Parklands Motel priced at £210 in total (We had a standard studio – ground floor)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Use of Communal Kitchen, Paid Laundry Room on Site. Very happy with the accommodation at the price we paid.

Te Anau to Lake Hawea (5th to 25th March 2023)

The 240km drive takes you back to Queenstown before the road climbs into the mountains and the journey ends in the lakeside town of Hawea. The scenery in this area is outstanding, there’s some incredible hikes here too. We found Hawea’s accommodation to be cheaper than the more popular Wanaka but you’re still just a 15 minute drive away. We had hoped to find a pet sit for our 20 days in this location, but nothing came up. We’d already pre-booked some “free cancellation” accommodation months before and although it dented the budget a little, it was great to be pet free and fully explore this fabulous area. We had day trips to Lake Wanaka and back down to Queenstown along with Arrowtown. Climbed Roy’s Peak and Isthmus Peak. Hiked along the river at Albert Town and around Hawea Lake and found the best carrot cake in New Zealand!

Accommodation in Hawea was at Hotel Lake Hawea priced at £732 in total (We had a double room with shared bathroom and kitchen)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness reasonable, Free Parking, Free Wifi, Use of Communal Kitchen although a little basic. The bathrooms and toilet block were in a separate building outside of the hostel rooms (not advertised like this). We booked a room with shared bathroom as accommodation was pretty pricy in this area. We’ve stayed in much better and well equipped hostels. It was adequate at the price we paid, but we would stay in Wanaka next time if we could afford to. Location was still great though, right on the lake.

Lake Hawea to Christchurch (25th to 26th March 2023)

From Lake Hawea we were heading to Kaikoura but decided to break the journey up with an overnight stay in Christchurch. The 430km drive to Christchurch takes about 5 and a half hours and provides great views of the Southern Alps and the opportunity to visit Lake Tekapo on the way up.

Accommodation in Christchurch was at Kings of Riccarton Motel priced at £56 for the night (We had a king studio)
Review: Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness good, Free Parking, Free Wifi, Kitchenette in the room with kettle, hob, microwave and fridge. Perfect for the night!

Christchurch to Kaikoura (26th to 29th March 2023)

An early start to make the 280km drive up to Kaikoura taking about 2 and half hours. Worth mentioning our coffee stop around half way at the Fossil Point Cafe in Greta Valley. Great coffee served by “Kiosk Keith” and relaxing outdoor space with nice views, food looked good too but we’re on a budget so just watched other tables consuming it!
Arrived in Kaikoura early afternoon, its a stunning location, had time for a walk along the sea front before heading to our accommodation. We were lucky enough to have 3 nights in Kaikoura and had pre-booked a Whale Watching Trip for the next afternoon. A brilliant trip sighting Orca Whales and a “a bucket list moment” as we came across a pod of over 200 dolphins who swam with the boat as we headed back to shore. We highly recommend the trip if you are in Kaikoura, the staff on the boat are brilliant!
On our second full day in Kaikoura we walked along the coast to the seal colony and spent time in the town centre. It’s a beautiful spot and we could have easily spent a week here.

Accommodation in Kaikoura was at Mondello Kaikoura priced at £151 for 3 nights (We had a studio with spa bath) and what a BARGAIN we got by booking early!
Review: Really Lovely Room, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness excellent, Free Parking, Free Wifi, Kitchenette in the room with kettle, hob, microwave and fridge, great spa bath. Perfect location, walking distance to the town and to the Whale Watching Reception!

Kaikoura to Christchurch (29th March to 5th April 2023)

After one more morning walk in Kaikoura we made the journey back to Christchurch for our 7 day explore of the city. 7 days was plenty of time to see the sites including the gallery, food market, river punting station, Hagley Park and the Botanical Gardens. We also had time to catch up on some online work too!

Accommodation in Christchurch was at Southern Comfort Motel priced at £389 for 7 nights (We had a deluxe queen studio).
Review: Good price, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness good, Free Parking, Free Wifi (but not a great reception), Kitchenette in the room with kettle, oven and hob, microwave and fridge. It was really like a little 1 bedroom flat. Walking distance to the city centre and Botanical Gardens. As we got such a good deal we couldn’t complain about the room as it had everything we needed for a self catering stay, but it could have done with a little bit of TLC, saying that we’d stay there again as the room facilities were good.

Pet Sitting in Christchurch (5th April to 16th April 2023)

Pet Sitting Archie the Cavapoo in Christchurch. We took him for long walks to Brighton Beach, Hagley Park, Christchurch Farmers Market, Sumner Beach and Mona Vale Garden Park.

This accommodation was completely free thanks to house and pet sitting!

Christchurch to Picton (16th April to 20th April 2023)

Leaving our sit early in the morning we headed up the coast towards Picton (340km taking around 4 and a half hours). We had heard about a The Kaikoura Seafood BBQ, serving good value Crayfish and other seafood on the grill. So we stopped here for lunch and were not disappointed, good prices too. We recommend it if your in town and fancy a lobster! We continued our journey up to Picton in the afternoon. We had 4 nights in Picton. One day we drove the coast road around to Havelock. Another day we walked the coastal path to the Snout with great views of the Sounds. The third day we walked around Picton, watched the ferries leaving while drinking coffee at the French café on the sea front and drove up to the Karaka view point.

Accommodation in Picton was at Sequoia Lodge Backpackers priced at £160 for 4 nights (We had a double room with private bathroom).
Review: The worst accommodation we had throughout our trip, The room was very basic, communal kitchen, dining and lounge areas were very tired looking and the whole place needed some investment. The accommodation was so bad that we cancelled our other accommodation we had planned in Picton and re-booked at the Tombstone Motel, Lodge and Backpackers. Much much better accommodation, which we have reviewed further down in this blog post.

Pet Sitting in Wakefield (20th April to 25th April 2023)

We took advantage of a pet sit in the Tasman village of Wakefield (3 adorable cats), perfect as it allowed us free time in the day to explore the North Coast. During our time there we spent a day hiking in Abel Tasman National Park, another walking some of the lovely footpaths by the river at Wakefield, a trip in to Nelson and a trip to the Marlborough Wine Region.

This accommodation was completely free thanks to house and pet sitting!

Originally we had booked a further 5 nights in Picton when we left Wakefield, but we decided we’d had enough time there and thanks to free cancellation accommodation we were able to change our plans. We had heard that Akaroa half an hour south of Christchurch was worth a visit and we also wanted a little more time in Kaikoura. So we decided to break the 5 nights up and had 1 night in Picton, 2 nights in Kaikoura, 1 night in Christchurch and 1 night in Akaroa, as you’ll see below.

Wakefield to Picton (25th April to 26th April 2023)

We had a leisurely drive through the wine region on the way back to Picton and arrived at the motel in time for supper which we’d prepared before we left the pet sit.

Accommodation in Picton was at Tombstone Motel, Lodge and Backpackers priced at £47 for the night (We had a double room with private bathroom).
Review: Good price, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness Excellent, Free Parking, Free Wifi. Lovely communal kitchen and lots of communal lounge areas. Games room with pool table and a hot tub for all guests use. Freshly made complimentary cheese scones and toast and jam for breakfast. If you’re taking the ferry to or from the North Island this is a great location as its just a few minutes walk away. Easy walking in to Picton town centre too. Highly recommended!

Picton to Kaikoura (26th April to 28th April 2023)

Due to our last minute accommodation changes, the only accommodation we could find in our budget in Kaikoura was at the Lazy Shag. Our expectations were pretty low (but we were pleasantly surprised as you’ll see from our review below). While in Kaikoura we had a lovely walk and a BBQ fish platter at The Kaikoura Seafood BBQ (As the first time we ate here was so good we just had to do it again!). We were also lucky enough to sit and watch 100’s of baby seals playing in the rock pools about 20 metres away. One of many great memories to take away from Kaikoura!

Accommodation in Kaikoura was at The Lazy Shag priced at £90 for the 2 nights (We had a double room with private bathroom).
Review: Good price for Kaikoura, Big room, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness Good, Free Parking, Free Wifi. Fridge and kettle in the room, Good communal kitchen. Easy walking in to Kaikoura. Pleasantly surprised and recommended for the price we paid!

Kaikoura to Christchurch (28th April to 29th April 2023)

We took a leisure drive back from Kaikoura down to Christchurch. The road out of Kaikoura is simply stunning and we never got tired of this journey. On the way to Christchurch we drove through tree lined hills, vineyards and endless fields of sheep, cows, deer and lamas.

Accommodation in Christchurch was at Tower Junction Motor Lodge priced at £52 for the night (We had a studio).
Review: Good price, Nice room, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness Excellent, Free Parking, Free Wifi (Limited to 2GB per day). Kitchenette with hob, microwave and fridge. Recommended!

Christchurch to Akaroa (29th April to 30th April 2023)

We were looking forward to this 80km drive taking about an hour and a half. The drive took us south out of Christchurch and after a while we started to see hills again. The road takes you high up and gives you stunning views of the sea inlet before you take the final few miles down towards Akaroa. Akaroa is a pretty little town set right on the waters edge surrounded by hills. It has a French colonial history and home to Hector Dolphins and Pohatu Penguins. We were lucky enough to see a penguin fishing in the bay during our time in Akaroa. There are a few bars/restaurants, fish and chip shops and gift shops in the town. Its a lovely place to spend a couple of nights.

Accommodation in Akaroa was at Tresori Motor Lodge priced at £93 for the night (We treated ourselves and had the honeymoon suite).
Review: Lovely spacious room, Comfortable Large Bed, Cleanliness Excellent, Free Parking, Free Wifi. Kitchenette with electric frying pan, microwave, Fridge and kettle in the room, Double spa bath. 2 minute walk to the promenade and restaurants. Highly recommended!

Akaroa to Christchurch (30th April to 1st May 2023)

We took the leisurely one and a half hour drive back to Christchurch, stopping at Little River Café and Store for coffee on the way. Beautiful café with good coffee!

Accommodation in Christchurch was at Southern Comfort Motel priced at £47 for the night (We had a studio).
Review: Great price, Comfortable Bed, Cleanliness good, Free Parking, Free Wifi (but not a great reception), Kitchenette in the room with kettle, microwave and fridge.

Internal Flight From Christchurch to Dunedin – Flying With Air New Zealand – £90 in total one way for 2 people with luggage and seat selection.

Dunedin (1st May to 28th May 2023)

The final 28 days of our trip took place in Dunedin where we house and pet sat for Bowie a Border Collie. The owners left us a car so that we could explore the local beaches, Larnach Castle and the area around Dunedin with Bowie. Dunedin is away from the main tourist spots of the South Island. Its got some great beaches and shopping! If you have the luxury of lots of time in places like Queenstown, Milford Sound, Wanaka and Kaikoura then give it a visit, but quite honestly we’d rather have another month in the lakes area as they were simply stunning!

This accommodation was completely free thanks to house and pet sitting!

A few general tips about our costs:

Flights: These were booked with Air New Zealand who provided a comfortable flight both ways. We flew from Sydney, Australia as we had been visiting before our trip to New Zealand, we flew back to Melbourne in Australia as this was our next destination to explore! We have included the one internal flight we took from Christchurch to Dunedin at £90.

Car Hire: We booked this really early when Car Rentals were offering up to 25% discounts. Great thing we found was that upgrading to fully comprehensive and extra driver was just £145. Worry free car hire as they call it. Keep your eye out for the bargains as car hire in New Zealand can be pricey!

Accommodation: Book as early as possible and always on free cancellation. We couldn’t find better prices than Booking.com and nearly all rooms could be booked and cancelled for free, giving us the opportunity to swap accommodation if a better deal comes up nearer the time, which it did on one occasion. Sign up with them and after booking with them for a while you will gain genius status with regular offers of up to 15% discounts, free breakfast, room upgrades and cool stuff like that! We researched our accommodation well, wanting the best prices but with good reviews on cleanliness, comfort and either an en-suite or our own room with shared bathroom and kitchen! All but one of our accommodation were brilliant and we’ve listed and review them all individually above in this blog.

Pet Sitting: To stay as long as we could in New Zealand on our budget we took advantage of three pet sits. A week in Christchurch, 5 nights near Abel Tasman and 4 weeks in Dunedin (We estimate that this saved us well over £2000 (4000 NZD) in accommodation costs. We could have done more sits and easily saved another £1500 on our £2500 total accommodation costs bringing the total down to under £1000 for the 3 and a half months. But we chose to spend more and be pet free for much of our trip as this was our first time in New Zealand.

Petrol: We spent a total of £460 on fuel and covered well over 3000 kilometres.

Sightseeing Tickets: We booked three sightseeing trips. A boat trip on Milford Sound – £165. A cruise and BBQ buffet in Queenstown – £200 and a Whale Watching Trip in Kaikoura – £200

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Pre-planning For Our Next Big Trip!

We’ve spent the last few months pet sitting in the UK while we save and plan for our next big adventure. This one will be our longest in duration and the furthest we’ve travelled as we head through Asia and on to Australia and New Zealand for what we hope will be a 12 month adventure.

We’ve had so many lovely messages from people we’ve inspired to take up House and Pet Sitting as a way of seeing more of the world. We thought this blog post may be really helpful for anyone thinking of planning a house and pet sitting adventure or perhaps some of you that have been building reviews locally with a plan to head off further afield.

We’ll be sharing details of all the pre-planning we’ve done which we hope will make our latest adventure go as smoothly as our last. We really hope you may find little snippets that you can use when planning your own house and pet sitting adventure.

Funding Our Travel

The most important first step has been for us to make sure we can afford the adventure. We always make a rough financial plan for any adventure and make sure we list every expense we’ll have to cover for that period of time. Once we have the final figure, we can then work out how we go about raising the funds for the trip. So how do we get to that final figure?

OK, well we start with the most important list of costs …… Travel Insurance, Flight Costs, Transport On The Ground, Food Costs, Any Other Accommodation Costs and A Buffer Fund. We then take each one individually and break them down to get a final figure for each. So for our up coming 12 month trip the figures may look a lot at first glance, but spread them out over 12 months and the monthly cost is a lot less than you might think. (Just to say our cost are in British Pounds, anyone from other countries reading this will need to convert the numbers to their own currency.

So here it is then our breakdown for the trip ahead.

Travel Insurance – £1,020 for the year (Yep I know its horrendous, hopefully you youngsters will get it much cheaper!!)
Flight Costs – £3,660 (Well we have quite a few flights …. UK to Thailand, Thailand to Australia, Australia to New Zealand, New Zealand to Australia, Australia to UK)
Transport on the Ground – £1,500 (This figure is our best guess, but we’ve worked out roughly what we need including taxis in Thailand, Buses in Australia, Car Hire and Trains in New Zealand.
Food Costs – £5,500 (Now not everyone could have a food budget so low, but we know how cheaply we can eat and worked out that we can live on £15 per day. How do we do it? Firstly, we rarely buy alcohol while we’re travelling, Secondly, we’ll live really cheaply on £5 a day 3 times a week, so we then get to live on £22.50 a day the other 4 days of the week (Happy Days)!
Any Other Accommodation Costs – £1,000 (Sometimes you just can’t get back to back house sits, which means you have a gap to fill and somewhere to stay is needed. Having room in the budget for this is a must. We’ll of course do whatever we can to get a free bed for the night, We’ve couch surfed like the rest of you youngsters!)
A Buffer Fund – £2,000 (If things go wrong and from time to time they will, a bit of a decent Buffer Fund is highly recommended. This could cover anything from a Sit cancellation to an unplanned plane ticket, who knows, but we’re glad to have it).

So lets summarise those costs:
Travel Insurance – £1,020
Flights – £3,660
Other Transport – £1,500
Food – £5,500
Other Accommodation Costs – £1,000
Buffer Fund – £2,000
Total Trip Budget – £14,680

That’s £14,680 for the year = £1,223 per month
You’ve got to say that’s not too bad when you think we’ll travel for 12 months to the other side of the world and back!

So we have our final number as approximately £1,250 a month we need to either earn while we travel, or as we do, earn before we travel.

How we fund our travel, including this trip, is through our online work, coupled with full time house sitting for a few months in the UK, which saves us £1000’s in costs (which we would have if we owned a home) Over just 5 months with careful spending we’ve saved a third of our upcoming trip amount. The rest will come from our online earnings.

OK, so that’s the funding sorted …… By the way if anyone may be wondering how to work remotely or how to go about setting up an online business, please take a look at this link: How To Fund A Life Of Travel

How We Worked Out The Budget

So now that we’ve worked out some figures, we’ll go through a bit more detail of how we worked all these numbers out.

1.) Travel Insurance
There are various types of insurance and depending on the length of time and type of trip will determine which is the best insurance for your needs. We’ve paid a higher price as we have to declare a pre-existing condition and we also have cover for 12 months. Insurance can be much cheaper for you youngsters and for shorter trips.
We’ve used Avanti and Allcleartravel recently for our travel insurance needs but shop around. Comparison Sites can be a good way of getting an idea of best prices.

2.) Flights
We tend to use a flight comparison site (Kayak and Skyscanner are our go-to sites) to initially check flight prices and then once we have found the best prices for a flight we take a look at the companies offering the flights and select a company we have used in the past.

If you take a look at the screenshot below, we’ve made a search for flights from London to Bangkok. Thai Airways have a well priced flight and the cheapest company offering the flight is Travel2Be.

From experience, some of the third party budget flight sales companies offering the flights cheaper than the airlines themselves may be cheap, but they can be a nightmare to deal with once you’ve booked your flight. We’ve been lucky using some in the past, but on other occasions when we’ve needed to change flights, add seats and check in, some have been less than helpful.

If you look at the screenshot below for the same flight, if you click on the little “20 more” icon, it lists all the companies selling the same flight. We also check the airlines price directly through their website as sometimes for an extra few pounds booking directly gives you a bit more peace of mind.

Everyone has a different view on flight bookings and it really depends on your budget. Personally, if its a short hall flight of 3 hours or so and we don’t mind where we sit on the plane we’ll always book the cheapest we can. If we’re flying for 8 hours or more and we want to sit next to each other we’ll do a bit more research on who we book through.

3.) Other Transport Costs
Although we have an idea of where we plan to visit on this adventure and have already pre-booked some airport transfers (we use Hoppa most of the time unless we can find a local taxi firm with good reviews). We can’t plan every single bus, internal flight, boat transfer or train journey. We always do a little research in to which mode of transport would be cheapest in each country. Its worth doing the sums too, as an example, we almost booked an overnight train journey in Thailand which would have taken 12 hours, we then found that Airasia would fly us the same route for £10 more and have us at our destination in 1 hour. Always shop around when you want to get from A to B. Social media is a great way to get tips from people who have already done the trip. Its amazing how many helpful people there are on local community groups and forums.

4.) Food Costs
We covered how we work out our food budget in the last section. We can live on £15 per day. How do we do it? Firstly, we rarely buy alcohol while we’re travelling, Secondly, we’ll live on £5 a day 3 times a week, so we then get to live on £22.50 per day the other 4 days of the week. We are very strict with this budget and the way we see it, we would rather eat and drink less, for the chance to visit a bucket list destination like the ones we’ve been lucky enough to visit in the pictures below!

5.) Other Accommodation Costs
As we mentioned before, sometimes you just can’t get back to back house sits, which means you have a gap to fill and somewhere to stay is needed. If you are happy bunking up with 12 others in a hostel room your budget may be much less than ours! Its a best guess figure but we’ve gone for 20 nights of accommodation at £50 per night which gives us a good couple of weeks extra accommodation in the budget should we need it. We always use Booking.com as they offer free cancellation on most rooms and this is a real plus if our plans change last minute and we need to cancel a room and get our money back.

6.) Buffer Fund
We mentioned earlier that things can go wrong from time to time on an adventure or you need some extra money for something you hadn’t planned to do. This can be anything from a visit to a doctor, a real pig out day at a restaurant, an unplanned plane ticket or a bucket list experience like paying for a bungy jump! A bit of a Buffer Fund is highly recommended and we’ve given ourselves £2000 which we’ll probably spend on bungy jumps and happy hour beer!

A Summary Of Pre -planning Any Trip

We hope you’ve found this blog post useful and we hope we’ve thought of everything we need to make our trip run smoothly. We’ll be setting off on the 10th November 2022 so look out for more blogs on our 12 month pet sitting adventures.

To finish though we’d just like to add a few more tips about pre-planning trips which again we hope some of you may find of use.

Currency
When we are planning a trip we are always very mindful of the amount of cash and currency we will need to carry while we are away. We always carry a little cash in the currency of the countries we are visiting. The rest of the currencies we will pre-load on to a pre-paid card. We highly recommend Revolut. We’ve been using them since they first set up and we’ve always found them the perfect option for us. We load the card with our home currency (UK Pounds) and then change money to other currencies using an app, We have a physical visa card and a virtual card too. We can make payments and withdraw cash in any local currency we have on the card and we get really good exchange rates as well.

Border Controls
We make sure we have all our visa’s and papers in order before we head off on our adventure. This is really pretty important especially when we are House and Pet Sitting which often allows us to stay in a country longer than most tourists can afford.

Which ever country we are visiting, we check to see what visa requirement we need to arrange. Firstly, we check how long we can stay in the country as a tourist and make sure we can travel to our next country on a new visa. Our reason for visiting any country is as a tourist to see the sites, so as a result we require a tourist visa to enter some countries. We also check if any of the countries require us to provide an onward flight ticket, or to prove we have sufficient daily funds to pay for our stay. We also carry a rough itinerary of our route and include any paid accommodation bookings, stays with friends (our pet owners have already become friends before our trip – so we call them friends on our itinerary rather than pet sits!). We include any other touristy things we have pre-booked such as car hire/transport and any attraction bookings. Anything that shows border control we are tourists (even if longer term tourists) and visiting their country to see the many amazing sites they have to offer us.

The Boring Bits
We weren’t going to include any boring bits but we thought we should just mention one more thing. We always make sure we have everything organised in our “home” country (we call the UK our home country even though we are Nomads, as this is where we are originally from). We book and pay for a dentist appointment for a check up and clean before we leave. We always give a family member our itinerary just in case anyone needs to know where we are in an emergency. We have top up phone cards for our home country. We pause these and buy new temporary pay as you go sims in any countries we are visiting. Another thing you may have to think about is if you have direct debits set up in your home country make sure you have left enough funds in your account while you are away!

Best of luck with your next adventure, have an awesome time and we hope you’ve found this blog post useful.

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3 Months in Manly, Australia – Almost Accommodation Free!

We recently returned from a 3 month trip to the Sydney Northern beach resort of Manly in Australia and had the most amazing time along with 63 days of those days ACCOMMODATION FREE! saving us in excess of £10,000 in accommodation costs. We stayed in beautiful homes in a location that would normally cost more than £1,200 per week rental fees!

We also had the company of beautiful Charcoal the Cavapoo pup for 7 of those weeks, staying in a nice apartment just 5 minutes walk from Manly Wharf. 2 further weeks were spent house sitting a lovely villa with private pool high on the clifftop with fabulous views of the ocean.

All thanks to house and pet sitting which has given us this amazing travel opportunity.

We arrived in Sydney in mid December 2021 with Covid restrictions still in place, meaning we had to self isolate for 6 days while we had two negative tests after arriving in the country. We had pre-booked some cheap accommodation in Sydney for this time (ordinarily we would have been able to start house sitting as soon as we arrived and normally wouldn’t have the added cost of accommodation on arrival). Six days later, we were released from quarantine and stayed with our children in Sydney over Christmas. Our first 7 week house and pet sit was due to start shortly after Christmas.

We arrived at our house and pet sit about an hour before the owners were leaving. We had a tour of the apartment and a little walk with the owners and Charcoal the Cockapoo who would be our little pup for the next 7 weeks. The first evening we took little Charcoal down to the ocean and a lovely walk along the promenade.

Charcoal was the perfect little chap, who just loved to go everywhere with us and watched our every move. Over the next few weeks we had a wonderful time with him, taking him on long walks along the coast, drives to different beaches, dog parks and daily visits to the local cafes.

Friday nights was happy hour at The Bavarian at the Wharf in Manly. This was Charcoal’s favourite pub, so we just had to take him along so he could people watch and scare the seagulls! He loved all the little outings he had with us.

Charcoal was really keen to explore Sydney with us and show us all the sites. The ferry that goes from Manly to Sydney requires dogs to be in a crate to be able to board the ferry. Unfortunately the owners didn’t own a crate, so we asked the ferry crew if we could take him on in a bag which they agreed would be OK. So over the next few days we taught Charcoal to sit in a bag and walked him around the house in it. After a couple of days he loved it, so we took him on the ferry and a day trip in to Sydney.

While we had Charcoal we were lucky enough to spend time with our grandson. We asked the owners if it would be OK for Charcoal to join our sons dog Moose and our grandson at the local dog parks. The owners were thrilled as they new Charcoal really liked play dates with other dogs. Charcoal and Moose quickly became best buddies and had some really awesome times together.

Our 7 weeks with Charcoal was far too short. He really had a wonderful time with lots of fun at the beach and long walks along the coast. We took him swimming regularly. To start with he was a little hesitant to go very deep into the water but after a few days he was running and jumping in and fetching a ball and swimming with us. He also loved to people watch down by the Wharf or at the local coffee shops.

He also loved that we were at home a lot of the time too, as he liked to help us with our work, really loved to have some grooming and especially chilling with his wombat in his comfy bed.

After a tearful goodbye to Charcoal we headed off to a house sit about a 20 minutes walk from Manly Wharf. We didn’t have any pets to look after this time, just the property and the swimming pool which Jonathan has experience of from his days as a pool manager. The house sit was for 3 weeks but unfortunately the weather took a turn for the worst and Sydney had the most rain and flooding for over 50 years. However, this didn’t put a damper on our time at the villa as we still managed to get a few walks out and visits from our little grandchild who even had a sleepover with us one night.

We spent our final week in Australia staying at the Boutique Lodge Manly to have a little bit of rest and relaxation, a final bit of time with the grandchild and get ourselves ready for the return trip to England.

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House Sitting

A Guide To Starting House Sitting

We’ve been house and pet sitting full-time now for nearly 5 years and have had long holidays in numerous locations with the company of adorable and loving pets and all we pay for is our transport and food. We spent 3 months in California, 3 months in Australia, 7 weeks in Spain, as well as time in France and Thailand. We’ve also stayed in many of the UK’s top tourist destinations.
Read our step by step guide, including everything we’ve learned along the way. Find out how you can become a house and pet sitter in your spare time, part time or full time and travel the world on a budget.

So What Does House Sitting Involve?

Basically, house sitting is when you live in and care for someone’s home, often taking care of their pets at the same time. To be honest, the majority of house sits do involve taking care of peoples pets as well as their home.
One of the real advantages of house sitting is that it allows you to “live like a local” instead of staying in hotels, you experience a destination as if you lived there yourself, with all the comforts of a home.
You don’t have to house sit full-time like us, its also perfect for the occasional getaway, or the odd week during the year. For example, we’ve had all sorts of house sits from a long weekend in Norfolk and Suffolk, to a week or two in Scotland and Wales. As well as longer sits in Spain, USA, Thailand and Australia.

What Does A House Sitter Do?

People use house sitters to look after their home and pets while they go away for short or long breaks. You’ll be responsible for looking after the security of the home and things like collecting the mail, watering plants and maybe cutting the grass on longer sits. The majority of people use house sitters as an alternative to boarding their pets. It’s clear that pets are much happier at home, following their normal routines, being looked after by other pet lovers who give them a holiday while their owners are away.

Can Anyone House and Pet Sit?

Absolutely! Potentially, anyone can house sit. But you really must enjoy the company of pets and take the responsibilities and house sitting duties seriously. We know of single sitters, couples, families and even people with their own pets having amazing experiences house and pet sitting around the world.

How Can I Start House and Pet Sitting?

It really is quite simple! Just sign up to one of the many house sitting platforms. OK, but which one though? Well, we are registered with the largest one, Trustedhousesitters, we’ve been with them for nearly 5 years now and to be honest we haven’t needed to join any other platforms as we’ve found all the sits we needed for our adventures so far in the UK, Spain, America and Australia.

Any Tips When Joining?

Well, there are few things we did from the moment we joined and we’re happy to share these with you and hope they help you become just as successful.

Once you’ve joined Trustedhousesitters its a good idea to consider the following. These are all the things we did and we are sure that they really helped us secure house sits.

Think About A Catchy Profile Photo!

You need to stand out from the competition so your profile really needs to catch the owners eye. A catchy profile photo was the first thing we thought about. We felt it was important to get across our love of pets. If you click on “find a pet sitter” on the THS website, notice how many sitters only have a photo of them, but no pet in the photo. Not only does having a pet in the photo show your love of pets but also shows you have experience of pets already.

Our profile photo has us with beautiful Txuri the Pyrenean Mountain Dog

Ask People For Character References!

Ask people you know for Character References as these are really important. Not only do they show how reliable and suitable you are for house sitting but until you have some pet sitting reviews, references play a big part in your profile. They also show up under you profile photo when owners are searching for sitters.
Just as an example – on the right shows Julie has two Character References and Jonathan doesn’t. Julie already stands out!

Create A Great Profile For Yourself!

Highlight your strong points about your personality and what you would bring to the house/pet sit.
Include any past experience of house and pet sitting, however small, maybe you looked after your friends tortoise one day, just make sure its all included.
Have you got any skills that might be handy during the sit? Think about anything you may have done in the past, maybe you have some experience with larger animals, perhaps horses, or have training in swimming pool maintenance, maybe good at gardening or DIY, cleaning or property management skills. Dig deep and build a list to add to your profile!

Sell Yourself With Your Photo Gallery!

Try and use photos that will again show your love of pets. Maybe you’ve got some photos of pets you’ve had in the past, or you have friends that will let you have photos taken with their furry or feathered friends. We did just that, and as we’ve been on sits have made sure we take a photo at each sit suitable for our profile photo gallery.

Any Tips For Getting Chosen For Sits?

Apply For Local House Sits First!

Probably our top tip that you might want to think about when starting out is to apply for local sits. We did this ourselves, as we put ourselves in the owners shoes and thought that if we were handing over our house keys and furry babies to strangers we would really want to meet them first. Especially as we had no sitter reviews when we first started. When we applied for our first 15 sits we let owners know that we could come and meet them before they selected us. As a result, the face to face meet up made it really easy for all 15 owners to choose us, but it also gave us the opportunity to meet the pets and have a look at the home. It was a great chance for us to make sure we would also be happy to do the sit.

Be Quick To Apply When You See A Sit!

As soon as you see a sit that ‘grabs’ you – respond quickly. You’ll be amazed at the amount of sitters that will also apply for some of the best sits. Being the first to apply has often enabled us to secure a sit. As you can imagine pet owners want to get booked up quickly and will quite often pick the first sitter that fits all the criteria they are looking for, rather than wait for numerous applicants and then have to sift through them all.

Make Sure Your Application Catches Their Eye!

Your first chance to impress any potential home owners will be online when you contact them directly with your application to sit for them. This will be the first impression the owners get of you. We always make our application email personal to them, mentioning their pets by name and responding to any particular requirements the owners asked for. This shows you have read their advert thoroughly, after all they have probably spent quite a bit of time writing it! Let the owners know what makes you the sitter they should choose. Mention your abilities and experience whilst also injecting your own personality into what you say. Sound as enthusiastic about the sit as possible and let them know what a great opportunity it would be for you as a sitter.

Be Sure To Offer A Video Call!

If you are lucky enough to be selected by owners on to their shortlist, you can be sure they’ll want to meet you virtually. Make sure you let them know in your initial application that you’d be pleased to have a video call with them. We have used Skype, Whatsapp or Facetime prior to confirming all our sits, it’s a great way to “meet” the homeowners, get to know them and ask any questions about the pets, house and sit in general. Both parties need to feel happy and relaxed that they’ve made the right choice.

Any Tips Once I've Been Chosen?

Ask The Owner For The Welcome Guide!

Make sure you ask the owner to send you a copy of their Welcome Guide. Read up on the sit well in advance, check that you have details of everything about the house, from the mains water tap and WIFI codes to the security alarm code and bin collection days. The pets routines and feeding information, details and phone numbers of the vets and any emergency contact numbers. Always arrive well prepared for the sit. Make a list of all the main points from the owners welcome guide.

Keep In Regular Contact With The Owner!

Anything you think of before the sit, either before or when you read the welcome guide, make sure you ask all the questions you need answered before the owner leaves you in charge.
Keep in contact with the owner about a suitable arrival time and just ensure you have a little contact with the owner before the sit, just to re-assure them you’ll be there on the day of the sit. Remember that some owners will be using a sitter for the first time and may be a little worried that the sitter won’t arrive.
Keep in touch with the owners while they are away. Its a great idea to ask how much communication they would like from you during your stay. Some owners love a daily picture and update of how their furry loved ones have been getting on. Some owners prefer contact only if an emergency arises. Ask what the homeowner prefers. We love to send photos of the pets showing they are happy and healthy, we think it puts the owners minds at rest while they are away from their home.

Do A Great Job And Receive A Brilliant Review!

As well as obviously taking great care of the pets and sending the owners little messages and photos while they are away. Keep the owner’s home clean and tidy. We probably go a little overboard when cleaning up before the owners return, but it all goes towards a good overall impression of how you have gone about completing the sit and the respect you have for the owners home. Recommendations often come from going a little above and beyond what most would consider normal!
On the owners return, apart from ensuring their pets are happy and relaxed and coming home to a clean house, consider spending a little time with them when they return. We have cooked a meal for some of our owners and chatted about our time in their home with their pets and listened to stories about the owners time away. If you’re a little short of time, then even a cake and coffee goes down very well.
Be sure to give the owner hints before you leave or in a little message a few days after the sit about giving you a review, a genuine review that can be read by future owners that may be considering you will be invaluable for your future sits!

We hope this blog post helps you start your journey as a house and pet sitter!

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How To Earn Cash From Matched Betting

During the Coronavirus Pandemic, we found ourselves short of income from our website business and the real necessity to find something we could do online to at least partly fill the gap with some extra cash. Trawling through the internet I came across Matched Betting. A little sceptical and with no betting experience I trod carefully as I researched the system in great detail …… After a couple of weeks of research I took the plunge with cash to fund my initial bets of just £50 ……

In just over 8 months I earned £5000 risk free and better still Tax Free!

If you’re interested in finding out how anyone can earn money from Matched Betting with as little as £50 start up costs, I’m happy to share my experience and give you all the information you need to start Matched Betting today and earn some extra tax free cash.

PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE HAVING A GO AT MATCHED BETTING

What exactly is Matched Betting?

In simple terms Matched Betting (as the name suggests is where you match a bet to win with a bet to lose) resulting in a system of making money from free bet promotions offered by bookmakers.

To take the risk out of the bet (to guarantee you won’t lose) you do something called “Laying” the bet.

Don’t worry, if it sounds complicated ….. if I can do it anyone can!

In this blog I will explain as simply as I can exactly how it works, run you through an example and then take you through a real promotion that you can copy to make your first cash from a promotion and hopefully set you on the path to earning a decent amount of extra cash from Matched Betting.

Let Me Give You A Simple Example!

Let’s say that a betting shop has a joining promotion offering you a £10 free bet if you place a bet of £10 on any event. So, take a horse race for instance ……. if you were to place a bet on Red Rum to win. There are two possible outcomes, Red Rum will either win or lose, so you will either win some money or lose all of your money. But, if you place a £10 bet on Red Rum to win as well as a £10 bet on Red Rum to lose, you won’t win any money, but you won’t lose any either. The two bets would cancel each other out, but as a result you would have met the requirements to claim your £10 free bet without losing any money. Take a look at the diagram below ……..

As you can see, if Red Rum wins the race, you both win and lose £10. If Red Rum loses the race, you also win and lose £10. Either way, your overall profit is zero, but you will have met the requirements to qualify for your free bet by placing a £10 bet on the horse race. So how do we make money from our free bet? Well, you could just place your free bet on anything and hope it wins, but you’d really be relying on luck and the odds are stacked against you winning! Matched betting is all about guaranteeing profit on free bets. To do that, we simply repeat the process again, covering all outcomes on another event. Doing this will give you around 80% of the value of your free bet. So, for our £10 free bet, we’d make around £8 profit.

Matched Betting In A Little More Detail!

Now we all know that in betting there is more than one outcome. For instance, on a football match there are three possible outcomes, a win, a draw or a loss. Because of this and the need to cover all outcomes on a bet in matched betting, we use something called an exchange. Now a normal bookmaker enables us to put bets on to win, but an exchange also gives you the option to put a bet on something to lose. So, to cover all outcomes of a football match ….. we can put a bet on the team to win with one bookmaker and put the same bet on the team not to win with the exchange (this part of the bet covers both a draw and a loss, as a draw still means the team hasn’t won the match). These two bets are called a “BACK” bet and “LAY” bet. A Back bet is the bet we place with the bookmaker on the team to win. A Lay bet is the bet we put on the same team to lose.

Below is another example using a football match between Burnley and Arsenal. We would be placing a £5 bet on Arsenal. So you can see we place our “BACK” bet with Coral on Arsenal to win at odds of 1.61 and to match the bet we would then place our “LAY” bet with Smarkets on Arsenal to lose at odds of 1.63.

Lets just familiarise ourselves with a few words that you’ll here often used in Matched Betting and exactly what they mean. You’ll come across them often so its worth having them here as a reminder.

“BOOKMAKER” – The bookmaker is where we will place our bet on an event to win!

“EXCHANGE” – This is a bookmaker who allows us to place the bet on an event to lose!

“BACK BET” – This is what the bet is called when you bet with the bookmaker on the event to win!

“LAY BET” – This is what the bet is called when you bet with the exchange on the event to lose!

OK, so now you have the basics of matched betting lets look at a real promotion.

We’ll Go Through Coral’s New Customer Promotion Making A
Guaranteed Profit of £15!

This is a new customer offer from Coral offering £20 in Free Bets when you bet £5. From this offer, we can make a guaranteed £15. This is a relatively easy offer to start with and more importantly you only need a small amount of funds to complete the offer.

First, You’ll Need To Open A Smarkets Account …… And Here’s How!

Smarkets is one of the best exchanges with more often than not good odds for matched betting. They’re also the largest of all the betting exchanges and its probably the best one to choose for those new to matched betting. Click below to go to the Smarkets website and follow the instructions to open a new account.

PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE JOINING SMARKETS

Next, You’ll Need To Open A Coral Account …… And Here’s How!

We’ve chosen Coral as they are offering new customers £20 in free bets when they place a bet of £5. Now this certainly isn’t the biggest welcome offer out there, but its best to start small as this ensures you don’t need a large amount of cash to get started. click below to open the Coral website and follow the instructions to open a new account.

PLEASE READ THROUGH THE WHOLE BLOG POST BEFORE JOINING CORAL

Changing The Bookmakers & Exchange Odds To A Decimal Rather Than A Fraction!

Normally when you see odds at a bookmakers you’ll see them as a fraction (as an example 2/1). But for matched betting we need to Switching to decimal odds as this makes comparing odds so much easier. Exchanges (in this instance we are using Smarkets as the exchange) use decimal odds already, but most bookmakers (in this instance we are using Coral) use fractional odds. You can usually find the switch to decimal odds either at the top of the page, in the sidebar on the left, or if you go to your account and open up settings. So with Coral for instance, its located in your account settings. To find them go to the very top right hand corner of the page and click on the image of a person, from the drop down menu click on settings, then click on betting settings. You’ll then see that you can click on Decimal, then click on Sports (top left of the page, next to the Coral logo). You can then see that all of the odds are now showing as decimals.

Placing Your Bets!

So, now that you have your Coral bookmaker account and Smarkets exchange account set up, lets get going with Coral’s introductory offer. Every offer you’ll come across has a few terms that you need to be aware of. Examples of this might be minimum odds of your bet, a particular sport or even a specific football match or horse race. If you look at Coral’s introductory offer terms, you’ll see that the our qualifying bet can be placed on any sport and the odds need to be a minimum of 1.5 or greater.

I recommend that you place your qualifying bet on a popular event that lots of people would be betting on such as Premier League Football. You’ll find it much easier to match your bets.
So just to remind you, we need to place our qualifying bet of £5 on any sporting event at odds of 1.5 or higher. Once we have done this and the event is over we will have met the criteria and be issued with our £20 in free bets.

Now when we place the £5 qualifying bet we want to find a game that has odds as near to 1.5 as possible. If you also remember the reason we joined two different bookmakers, Coral where we will be placing our “BACK” bet on the football team to win and Smarkets where we will be placing a “LAY” bet on the same team to lose. We need to make sure that we get both bets as close to each other as possible.

So, as an example if the odds for the football team to win are 1.5 we need the odds for the same team to lose to be as close to 1.5 as possible (eg. 1.51) If we do this we will be matching the bet and win or lose we will receive most of our £5 qualifying bet back.

Lets Find Some Odds Suitable For Our Qualifying Bet!

So, I’ve found odds of 1.61 for Arsenal to beat Burnley at Coral. This is our back bet. On Smarkets (the exchange), I’ve found that the odds for Arsenal to lose against Arsenal are 1.63 making the BACK odds and LAY odds nice and close, perfect for matching our qualifying bet.

Placing Our Back Bet!

So lets place our qualifying bet with Coral. You know you need to place a bet of £5 to qualify. Simply click on the ‘1.61‘ button underneath ‘Arsenal’, enter your stake of £5 and click ‘Place Bet. That’s it the BACK bet is placed.

Placing Our Lay Bet!

What you don’t know yet is how much you need to stake at Smarkets to even out your bets. This is where I use a Match Betting Calculator (I’ll tell you where to get a matched betting calculator, along with some really good guides at the end of the blog). You simply insert your back stake of £5 and our back odds which were 1.61 for Arsenal to win (back commission is 0% as coral don’t charge us a commission). We then insert our lay odds which are 1.63 on Arsenal to lose (Smarkets charge us 2% commission so insert 2% as the lay commission). The calculator will then tell you how much you need to stake at Smarkets to be as close to breaking even as possible. Based on my Arsenal example, that is a stake of £5.14 and results in a tiny overall loss of 12 pence. You can see this from the calculator results below.

In order to double check that we are placing the correct amounts on our bets we can use a checking calculator (I’ll tell you were you can find this and some other brilliant stuff to help make things a lot easier later in the blog). But for now take a look at the calculator below. You’ll see that I’ve placed in the £10 stake and the 1.61 Back Odds and 1.63 Lay Odds as in the diagram above. Scroll down a little further the part circled in red and you’ll see the “Profit Breakdown” show us that whether we win or lose the bet we will make a 20p loss on our qualifying bet.

OK, so we’ve placed our qualifying bet on the game, once the game is over we will be given a £10 free bet by Coral

Now in order to make money on our £10 free bet we use the same system of betting on a team to win and betting on the same team to lose (just as we have in the demonstration above.

But there is one important thing we have to do. That is to bet on team that has high odds. Look at the demonstration above again and you will see that we bet on Arsenal at 1.61 odds to win and 1.63 odds to lose.

With our free bet we want to look for a team with odds over 5.0

So something like Luton to win at odds of 5.50 and Luton to lose at odds of 5.60

With the odds high we can actually make money from the free bet whatever the outcome.

So we’ll place our bets again with Coral and Smarkets as in the diagram below ………

Below shows the calculator again using the rather clever “Free Bet Mode” (again I’ll show you where to access this neat bit of kit later)

You’ll see that this time I’ve placed the £10 free bet as the amount of the bet and then the 5.50 Back Odds for Luton to win and 5.60 Lay Odds for Luton to lose. Again, scroll down a little further and you’ll see the “Profit Calculator” which this time tells us that whether we win or lose the bet we will make £7.90 on our free bet.

So now that we’ve run through how matched betting works, placing a qualifying bet for a promotion and how you can extract a profit from a free bet you receive as a result of placing a bet on a promotion, you’re now ready to take advantage of all the other bookmaker sign ups and re-load offers with the potential to make £1000’s of pounds tax free. Good Luck!

MY BEST ADVICE IS TO TAKE YOUR TIME BEFORE YOU START MATCHED BETTING FOR REAL …….. AND BEFORE YOU HEAD OFF, PLEASE TO TAKE A LOOK THROUGH THIS MATCHEDBETTING BLOG BY MATT KIRKMAN WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND AS THIS IS WHERE I STARTED AND IT REALLY HELPED ME LEARN THE ROPES WHEN I STARTED OUT MATCHEDBETTING!

I REALLY DO RECOMMEND YOU READ THROUGH MATT’S BLOG BEFORE YOU START MATCHED BETTING AS I PICKED UP SO MUCH KNOWLEDGE FROM IT AND YOU CAN ALSO ACCESS BET MATCHING SOFTWARE WHICH HELPS HUGELY WITH PLACING YOUR BETS AND FINDING CLOSE ODDS. HIS FIRST OFFER WALK THROUGH IS REALLY USEFUL TOO!

ONE MORE THING …… MATCHEDBETTING FOR ME WAS A SHORT TERM INCOME GENERATOR. AFTER AROUND 8 MONTHS I HAD USED ALL THE PROMOTIONS OFFERED BY BOOKMAKERS AND EVENTUALLY THEY STOPPED OFFERING ME THE PROMOTIONS (THIS IS CALLED GUBBING IN MATCHEDBETTING TERMS). ITS NOTHING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT, THEY JUST DON’T OFFER YOU ANY MORE PROMOTIONS. AS A RESULT I STOPPED MATCHEDBETTING COMPLETELY.

I FEEL I DID WELL TO EARN £5000 FROM IT IN 8 MONTHS WITH NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE OF GAMBLING.

BE REALLY DISCIPLINED ABOUT IT THOUGH, STICK TO THE MATCHEDBETTING STRATEGY AND DON’T STRAY AWAY FROM IT AND JUST HAVE THE ODD BET WITHOUT MATCHING IT, ITS A SURE WAY TO LOSE MONEY. I CLOSED ALL OF MY ACCOUNTS, SO NOT TO GET TEMPTED WHEN I DECIDED THAT I HAD EARNED ALL I COULD FROM MATCHEDBETTING.

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Disclosure: Please note that some of the links in this blog post may be affiliate links meaning that, with no extra cost to you, we earn a small commission if you make a purchase. We recommend only products and companies we use.

Pet Sitting Rescue Dogs

We have just completed our 43rd pet sit, caring for Kai a big strong 4 year old male German Shepherd/Pit Bull Cross.

This has been our most challenging pet sit yet and also our most rewarding one.

So much so, that I felt compelled to share our experience with Kai and our other experiences so far with the different rescue dogs we have cared for, in the hope of highlighting some of our key observations we have made and strategies that have worked, that may help fellow sitters with rescue dog assignments and perhaps even owners of rescue dogs who are keen to hear about our experiences and results.

Kai is a rescue dog with more than a few anxiety issues, makes you wonder what the first part of his life was like. Woe betide anyone that strokes him without him seeing your hand move first and takes him unawares, lots of defensive barking. To add to that recently Kai had a traumatic event happen, his owner told us, when a previous pet sitter who got his prong chain collar stuck on him tightly and had to call in Animal Control to snip it off of him. Since then he has been understandably guarded about his collar. A next sitter left after just one day as Kai became aggressive towards her (all because of his anxieties with this collar).

He is a big strong dog and he gets over excited and hard to calm down. But when he does we can tell he has a loving side to him and wants to be good. As Pet Sitters we do all we can for the pets in our care and call on all our experiences and kindness to keep them safe and happy and feeling loved, always being respectful of their characters and anxieties. We’ll never be able to fix all the anxiety problems of a rescue dog that misses his mum and has had a recent trauma with a stranger. What we do is to try to create our own little oasis of calm and love for the pets and we take it everywhere we go.

Kai loved evening time and laid on or very close to us on the sofa, it melts our hearts seeing this softer side of him. He actually sleeps on the bed, so he must want to feel close to us, we didn’t mind. He has a cuddly blanket that he holds and sucks on at night when he’s tired, he’s such a needy boy really, it pulls on our heart strings.

Our week was consumed with providing Kai with so much love, encouragement, praise and attention. We told him ‘good boy’ continuously, unless it was not appropriate.

Kai lives with his lady owner and she mentioned on our arrival that Kai is quite dominant. He pulls on the lead, can be very boisterous when playing and barks at dogs he doesn’t like. He gets ‘spooked’ at loud sudden noises and if he is touched/stroked unexpectedly. She told us that on occasions Kai will guard the door to stop her from leaving him when she goes to work.

So with all of the above, we have set the scene for you about the type of pet with issues we have in our care for the week!

The prong collar Kai wears, his owner told us, is due to his pulling on walks. However, he has big issues with this collar as we explained above.

Now, I hear you shouting, why is the owner still making the dog wear the collar? The answer is that the owner, who has no problem herself putting it on Kai, felt it stops him pulling on the lead. She was very anxious about us using the collar with Kai, but she wanted us to use it as she knew it was a collar strong enough to hold him.

In fact, Kai is a clever dog and we believe could quickly be trained to walk better on the lead without pulling and then eliminating the need for the prong type of collar. We kept him close to us when walking and avoided other dogs when we could. When we had to pass another dog, we would turn and distract Kai away, getting him to sit for treats and then lots of praise when he ignored the other dog. By the end of our week he was walking much better, sitting at pedestrian lights, we were so proud of him!

Before I continue, having read just this back, it must sound as if this dog is far too dangerous to be left with strangers. But, honestly, Kai is anything but dangerous as we grew to learn during our time with him.

We’d love for you to continue reading this post and please do send your comments and experiences at the bottom of this blog post page. We ourselves learn something new about the pets in our care on every single sit and are still learning from others, it would be great to hear your experiences so we can all learn together.

Thanks for staying with us! I have become extremely interested in rescue dogs behaviour and recently taken a course in Canine Behaviour Training, purely to further my understanding of these beautiful animals.

Lets continue by telling you about the experience we had with Kai, what we learned and what we tried to provide him with the best pet sitting experience we possibly could.

Managing Aggressive Play with Kai

On arrival we were greeted with boisterous excitement from Kai and his immediate request for us to play tug the toy with him. The owner said he loved this type of play but can get a little aggressive and when this happens we should turn away and hide our hands and he then knows to stop.

Now we’ve sat for a number of dogs that love a game of tug of war, but Kai’s toy tugging play was true to the owners comment, meaning it quickly turned to aggressive behaviour towards myself including accidental biting, growling, and scratching. He really just didn’t know when and how to stop, the build up of excitement just got to a stage where he lost control.

From the moment we took charge of Kai, we toned down the tug playing game to a very gentle style, which meant that Kai would no longer be really pulling the toy away from us, each time he began to pull we just let go, as a result he just kept coming back to let us grab hold of the toy each time. If we felt he was starting to show any signs of aggression we would immediately let go of the toy.

With lots of praise and encouragement to be gentle and this very calm approach to his favoutie tug play, as soon as the second day we saw signs of a much gentler play from him and very little sign of the aggressive play we’d first experienced. As with all dog training, repetition, routine and rewards are definitely key. We noticed through the week Kai was playing in a much gentler manner.

Thinking about it though, if a dog has aggressive issues, its perhaps not such a good idea to encourage games that encourage signs of aggression. Maybe using a Kong to entertain them and throwing a ball when on walks might be a more suitable way of entertaining them.

Managing Stress Related Aggression

Our dreaded collar issues comes under this section! I have aleady told you about the awful experience Kai had with his collar just a few months before we sat for him, when his prong collar got tangled and had be cut off him. Now I can’t begin to imagine what an awful experience this must have been for Kai and trying to imagine what a stressful experience it was for him helped immensely in how we would go about fastening and removing his collar before and after each walk.

He was understandably very wary of having his collar put on and in particular having it taken off, especially with us being total strangers, so we took a gentle approach which seemed to be working well for the first couple of days. However, on day three, as we were taking off the collar he got spooked by a loud outside noise and became very aggressive to tell us to stop. Now any one that has experienced first hand an aggressive dog will know what a scary experience it can be! A few minutes after the event it was so obvious that Kai was very sorry and that his intention was not to harm us but just to tell us he was frightened.

In order to ensure Kai didn’t have any undue stress we decided to leave the collar on while we came up with a plan that may help him become more trusting of having the collar removed and be more comfortable with what for most dogs is a regular part of daily life.

We are true believers that the best form of dog training is praise and rewards. So using this Reward method, we would sit Kai down, 4 times a day, and show him a treat while we clipped his lead to the prong collar. Each time he let us do this we gave him the treat and plenty of praise. Kai was pretty intelligent and got the idea very quickly that the treat related directly to him letting us clip the lead to the collar.

We felt that we needed to gain Kai’s trust more before we attempted again to take his collar off. So coupled with the treats and praise when attaching and removing the lead, we spent a lot of time cuddling him, stroking him and pretending to accidentally touch the collar while giving him plenty of praise. We continued this for a full 3 days before we made the attempt to try and remove the collar. On day 6, on our return from the morning walk, Kai was already sitting waiting, his eyes fixed on his treat which was showed to him every time we removed the lead, but this time, very gently, we slid the collar off him …… and it worked! He got lots of praise as you can imagine.

The combination of treats, praise, building trust and repetition turned Kai’s bad experience into one that he now associated as being a positive experience (even if he ultimately new he would receive a treat as a reward for being so good!)

Managing Nervous Anxiety with Harry

August 2019 we sat for Harry – a very nervous and anxious but totally sweet rescue Saluki. Harry’s parents were retired and spent all of the day with him, never leaving him for more than a couple of hours. He was an extremely nervous dog, frightened of tall men in particular they said and they had never left him before with pet sitters. Bearing this in mind, when the owners got in touch we went out of our way to go and visit them prior to confirming the sit, so that they could meet us and hopefully be reassured that we would be suitable sitters for Harry but also for us to get a little idea of Harry’s anxieties.

From the moment we arrived at the home and the owners left for their vacation, Harry spent the whole day laying upstairs on the bed clearly wanting to be away from us. Julie went up regularly to check on him and chatted to him as she spent time in the room with him so that he could get to know her voice and presence.

Fully understanding Harry’s anxieties helped Julie coax him around to at least come down for his evening meal. It was clear that his anxiety was with me as the owners had made us aware of his nervousness of tall men. I gave him plenty of space and if close to Harry I made sure I spoke softly and made no sudden movements.

Julie was very quick to bond with Harry, she has a bit of a gift with anxious rescues and not only was she able to coax him to come down for his supper she also got him to sleep in his basket next to her side of the bed that night. The key thing was that we respected his anxiety and accepted that I had to almost ignore Harry until he felt ready to express an interest in me, as difficult as that was for me.

On day 2 Harry began walking passed me without becoming nervous and dashing by me as quick as he could, as he had before. On day 3 Harry ate his breakfast while I was in the kitchen – what dog doesn’t warm to the person that fills his food bowl up! He then let me take him out for his first walk of the day on our own – huge progress and a turning point.

Most dogs love to be groomed and Harry was no exception his owners had told us. So here was another chance to bond with him, at grooming time. Must have felt nice, we caught him smiling!

On day 4 Harry slept on the bed with us and let me stroke him and from then on happily came to me to have his lead put on at walk times. He had at last bonded with me through our taking gentle steps with him and going at Harry’s pace! A really rewarding experience!

Managing Separation Anxiety with Monty

We saw signs of separation anxiety behaviour whilst caring for Monty – a rescue Jack Russell Cross. This is quite a difficult anxiety to know how to manage but we found the best way to go about it was to keep Monty happy and entertained to take his mind off him missing his parents and being fretful. Taking him on his favourite long walks and lots of playtime with treats during the day and most importantly, for the first few days, was not leaving him on his own. This was a little easier as we were a couple so if we needed provisions one of us could go out for them.

This approach worked really well, spending lots of fun time with Monty, and over these first few days we saw a real change in his emotions and growing in confidence and he began to enjoy cuddles from us instead of shying away.

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Whistle Stop Tour Of Lake Tahoe

Thinking of visiting Lake Tahoe, well don’t hesitate as its a stunning location! Here’s the results of our whistle stop tour around Lake Tahoe in a day.

Our start point was South Lake Tahoe, located on the southern edge of the Lake, a bustling town with all the amenities you could need for a great summer or winter holiday. Lots of accommodation, great shopping, ski resort and lots of options for water sports.

Driving along the lakeside scenic road going anti-clockwise our first stop we headed towards Emerald Bay View Point and State Park.

Continue north on road 89 and you’ll reach Tahoe City, lined with shops and restaurants. Popular as a winter destination it has some lovely cross country ski tracks and popular ski resorts including the Sugar Bowl, while in summer the lake comes to life with sailing, canoeing and swimming.

Continue north from Tahoe City and you’ll pass Kings Beach as you head towards very popular Incline Village really popular with skiers due to its proximity to Diamond Peak Ski Resort. It also looks out over Crystal Bay putting it right up there as an all year round holiday hotspot.

As you reach Incline Village you start your journey down the other side of the lake. Popular scenic stops on route include Sand Harbor Beach, Bonsai Rock Trailhead and Secret Cove.

The road heads away from the lake for a while and passes Tahoe Nevada State Park, Spooner Lake, East Shore Forest. Before picking up Lincoln Highway taking you through Montreal Canyon back towards the lake.

Continue along Lincoln Highway south along the lakeside and you’ll find yourself back in South Lake Tahoe.

Allow a good 3 or 4 hours to drive round the lake. It took us 5 hours with 3 or 4 stops for photos, coffee and a half hour walk along the lakeside. Its a really lovely drive and we could have made more stops if we had more time, but we wanted to get back to South Lake Tahoe for sunset.

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Pets Sitting in San Francisco With Mookie The Samoyed

We have been lucky enough to have the chance to visit San Francisco all thanks to pet sitting. Our live in buddy for 10 days was Mookie the Samoyed. Just 1 and a half years old and full of energy, Mookie showed us the sights of Sunset District, his favourite Ocean Beach walk and all his mates down in the dog park at Stern Grove.

Tip: To give yourself the best chance of getting some amazing sits like this one in San Francisco take a look at our post on Joining Trusted House Sitters, full of tips on how to stand out above the crowds!

We had the use of the owners beautiful home in the heart of Sunset District, just a mile from the beach and a short walk to supermarkets and restaurants. The owners were kind enough to leave us their car so we could explore the area further and take Mookie to some of his favourite places.

Ocean Beach

A beautiful long sandy beach that welcomes dogs, the beach stretches from past Golden Gate Park to the end of San Francisco Zoo. Its a popular beach for surfers and has plenty of roadside parking. Mookie loved it here, chasing sticks, digging in the sand and playing with passing dogs.

Tip: Make sure to head to the beach for Sunset, you can get some great photos and watch the sunset while sitting on the sand dunes.

Stern Grove

Spanning over 30 acres Stern Grove Recreational Park is a great place for dogs as it has a nice dog park popular with the locals. Located in Sunset District it was just a few minutes drive from the house and one of Mookie’s favourite places. We took him to the park in the mornings as this was when his best friends a lively Alsatian, a Springer Spaniel and a baby French Bulldog were at the park. He couldn’t resist a paddle in Pine Lake one of three lakes in the park.

Tip: Keep an eye out for the dates of Stern Grove Festival, a free event of weekly concerts and performances held at the outdoor amphitheatre.

Downtown San Francisco

Unfortunately we were unable to take Mookie downtown as he wasn’t very keen on the crowds and traffic. The bus stop was conveniently located at the end of the road and the owners had said that the traffic and parking were both horrendous down town, so as we didn’t have Mookie with us we opted for the bus. We ordered a $5 all day ticket using the MuniMoblile App giving us access to all buses. A 50 minute bus journey from Sunset to Downtown, a quick change of bus and then down to Fisherman’s Wharf.

The Wharf is lined with shops and restaurants, make sure you walk as far as Pier 39, bustling with great places to eat, a variety of shops and a great atmosphere. If you fancy a boat trip under Golden Gate Bridge or a excursion to Alcatraz, then you can book them down at the wharf or during the busy months probably a good idea to book online.

Tip: We had lunch at Chowders on Pier 39, a bustling little restaurant serving great Clam Chowder, Fish and Chips and really good prawn cocktail. We highly recommend the Chowder, they serve both red and white, we opted for the white!

After lunch we took a walk up the steep hill at Hyde Street to take a look at the famous crooked street features 8 hairpin turns. You can take the Tram up the street if hill walking isn’t your thing!

Before we headed home to Mookie we had time to take a bus up to China Town to pick up some cheap fruit and veg. From here we could walk to Union Square shopping district, home to stores including Macy’s, Bloomingdales and H&M. From here we picked up the No.7 bus back to Sunset District.

Best Views Of Golden Gate Bridge

We just had to have a selfie at Golden Gate Bridge, so did a little research and found out that there are a few places you can get a good view from. We took the scenic drive from Sunset District around Sea Cliff. We stopped at Baker Beach to walk Mookie and had a picture with him on the beach and Golden Gate Bridge. We then drove on to Golden Gate Lookout for a selfie, but actually found that the photos on the beach had a better angle of the bridge.

Funston Beach and Park

A little gem just south of San Francisco Zoo and opposite Lake Merced, Funston Park is a great place to take the dog, with lovely walking paths following Sunset, Chip or Horse Trail. Sheltered by pine trees and with beautiful ocean views from some areas of the walking trails it really is an idyllic area. A popular hand gliding site too.

Funston Beach Trail takes you down a steep path which accesses the beach. A beautiful stretch of beach, when we visited we had the whole beach to ourselves. There is a car park at the southern end of the park.

This was one of Mookie’s favourite places to go!

Golden Gate Park

Golden Gate Park is huge measuring 1,017 acres and is located at the north end of Sunset District and really popular it boast within the park a golf course, an angling club, a dog training area, polo field, pedal and rowing boat hire, botanical gardens, Japanese tea garden, a 10,000 seat sports stadium, lots of picnic areas, two dutch windmill, numerous lakes and footpaths, a herd of bison and we even came across a gaze of raccoons!

Free parking is available on Ocean Beach car park at the bottom end of the park (shuttle service operates between the free parking lot at Ocean Beach and major attractions within the park. The shuttle runs every 15 to 20 minutes from 9 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays and major holidays. Limited time parking can be found on many roadside locations in the park and on the outskirts. Underground paid parking is available at The Music Concourse on the north side of the park at 10th Avenue and Fulton Street. More paid parking is available at Kezar Stadium located near the Stanyan Street entrance to the park open all week and Millberry Union on Parnassus Street at weekends only.

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16 Day, 2629 Mile, Road Trip Through California, Las Vegas and The Grand Canyon

We completed the most amazing 2,629 mile road trip through California including a hop into Nevada and Arizona. Taking in iconic sites as we drove along the scenic Pacific Highway 1 to Monterey and Carmel, Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park, Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas and The Grand Canyon, before heading back to Los Angeles on Route 66.

We’d like to share the journey with you, including all the costs to complete the trip which we hope may inspire you to follow our route or some of it taking in some of the most outstanding natural beauty, iconic sites and scenery the USA has to offer. Please note we took the trip in 2019, so please consider this when looking at our costings as they may well have increased since then, but it should give you a guide at least.

Summary of the all important total cost for the trip (We’ll break these costs down within the blog for each leg of the journey)

Return Flights: £978
Car Hire: £267
Accommodation: £855
Petrol: £310
Sightseeing Tickets: £144
Food: £520

Total Cost: £3074

Trip Dates: 31st October to 15th November 2019

A few general tips about our costs:

Flights: These were booked with Norwegian Air who in our view are the best budget long haul flight provider at the moment. We paid £488 Gatwick to Los Angeles and £490 Los Angeles to Gatwick. Latest price for return flights Gatwick/Los Angeles (with 20kg hold luggage) in February as low as £770 return total cost for 2 people. Bargain! *** UPDATED 2022 – Unfortunately Norwegian Air are no longer flying long haul routes since the pandemic. Hopefully another company will take on a budget long haul option for us travellers!

Car Hire: We booked this really early when Car Rentals were offering up to 50% discounts. Great thing we found is that insurance is fully comprehensive and extra driver is free. Worry free car hire as they call it. Keep your eye out for the bargains!

Accommodation: Book as early as possible and always on free cancellation. We couldn’t find better prices than Booking.com and nearly all rooms can be booked and cancelled for free, giving us the opportunity to swap accommodation if a better deal comes up nearer the time, which quite often did. Sign up with them and after booking with them for a while you will gain genius status with regular offers of up to 15% discounts, free breakfast, room upgrades and cool stuff like that! We researched our motel rooms well, wanting the best prices but with good reviews on cleanliness, comfort and good bath/shower room, and decided against shared hostels, although we have nothing against them! All having a fridge, microwave and coffee maker, all had super huge comfy beds/pillows.

Petrol: We estimated we would spend £220 on fuel but ended up spending £310. We under estimated both the amount of miles we would do but more the cost per gallon in different locations (we assumed we would do 2500 miles but we in fact covered 2629) and the price of fuel ranged from $3.40 to $4.65 right up to $7.95 – which we had to pay in the Mojave Dessert when we nearly ran out – we won’t make that mistake again!

Sightseeing Tickets: One of the best purchases we made was the America The Beautiful Annual Pass. Costing us $80 for the year it gives you access to all the National Parks in America including Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Entry for many of the parks can be as much as $35 per car. We visited National Parks on 5 occasions each costing $35 dollars to enter (works out we would have spent $175 on entry fees – we saved $85 and have the pass for the rest of the year if we return). Obviously you’ll have to work out how many parks you are going to visit to see if its better value (Visit more than two and its a saving!).
Tip: Ask for the pass at the first National Park you visit (its not always visible on the charge board when you arrive at the park, so make sure you ask for it).
Our other sightseeing cost was a whale watching trip in Monterey. We paid full price as it was spur of the moment (as blue whales had been spotted earlier in the day) and we weren’t disappointed,we saw 4! You can often find Whale Watching Tickets cheaper bookable in advance on Groupon which we often use for deals.

Food: This deserves a mention as everyone will have different ideas about a food budget. We can only tell you about our needs. Our total food budget for the trip was £1050 and you will see that we only spent £520. Here’s how and why we only spent this much.

How we spent this amount: We purchased a fold up cool bag, bought most of our food from Walmart or other Delis and supermarkets on route and kept food cold with ice readily available from the motels. We also made sure we only booked a motel room that had a fridge and microwave. We only ate in restaurants 3 times, the rest of the time we made use of motel microwaves or made up our own picnic meals and ate overlooking beaches or canyons. This certainly isn’t for everyone, but we have travelled like this before, through Thailand, making our limited funds go further while always eating healthy (Julie saw to that). We can honestly say that we never felt hungry during the 16 days and we even managed to have at least 10 Starbucks coffees within our budget! We did have quite a few rotisserie chickens, quite a few microwaved potatoes, and along with tinned tuna and fish, bread, fruit, salad and yoghurt, we did ok.

Why we spent this amount: Simple really, to save money – which you get to spend on other things. As a result of the saving, we were able to pay for a further 7 nights accommodation in San Diego! From where I am presently writing this blog. It’s the only part of our budget where we could actually save money and our view is that if we have to go without a few treats of big meals in restaurants and breakfasts in Diners to allow us to see another city or location then its well worth it!
It won’t be everyone’s view and some people couldn’t manage it, but we are more than happy to give you advice or share our tips on this in greater detail. Just get in touch.

This is the route we took with accommodation at Camarillo, San Simeon, Monterey, Mariposa, Visalia, Ridgecrest, Las Vegas, Flagstaff and Barstow.

On route visiting Santa Barbara, Solvang, Cayucos, Elephant Seal View Point, Big Sur, Carmel by the Sea, Monterey Fishermans Wharf and Cannery Row, Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon National Park, Suquoia National Park, Red Rock Canyon State Park, Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, The Grand Canyon and Route 66.

Day 1

We arrived at Los Angeles Airport at 4.30pm after a ten and a half hour flight from London with Norwegian Air costing £488 one way for 2 tickets.

Tip: We found seats 11E and 11F were good giving us more leg room at no extra cost!

Be prepared for 2 to 3 hours to get through security. We collected the hire car costing £267 for 15 days and headed off to our first nights accommodation at Camarillo, 55 minutes from Los Angeles Airport (Take the 405 North and 101 West).

1 night stay at Days Inn Camarillo priced at $58
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi

Day 2

Left Days Inn Camarillo via Walmart Supermarket a couple of minutes way, stocked up with food provisions for next 2/3 days ($30).

Continued our journey towards San Simeon on route 101 North.
1st stop Santa Barbara for a picnic lunch (nice beach, long walkways, free parking, picnic areas and BBQ’s).
2nd stop Solvang (pretty Danish village).
At Los Alamos we took Route 135 and then shortly after Highway 1 North
3rd Stop Cayucos – a pretty beach side village, nice shops, restaurants and cafes. Coffee from Cayucos Gas Mini Mart (2 coffees a bargain at $4) we watched the sunset on the pier

Arrived San Simeon at 6.30pm

2 night stay at Courtesy Inn San Simeon priced at $101
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Directly across the road from the beach, a Restaurant Next Door

Day 3

Day exploring the San Simeon area on Highway 1.
1st stop Elephant Seal Beach view point.
2nd stop San Simeon William R. Hearst state beach for picnic lunch (nice beach and picnic area overlooking the ocean).
3rd stop spotted the elusive roaming Zebras grazing in a field close to San Simeon.
4th stop Cambria (Moonstone beach boardwalk) and then into town for good coffee at Cambria Coffee Roasting Company ($4) and food provisions at Cookie Crock Supermarket on the edge of town ($6)
Back to San Simeon to watch an awesome sunset.

Tip: Walk across Highway 1 from the motel and down to the beach to the left is a small park area with fire pits and seating in front of Cavalier Oceanfront Resort, the fire pits were all lit at night while we were there, a great place to sit and watch the sunset!

Day 4

Left Courtesy Inn San Simeon at 8.30am taking Highway 1 North.

Lots of stunning scenery and view points all the way along the route (including Big Sur and Bixby Creek Bridge). Filled up with fuel on route at Gorda ($40).

Arrived Monterey at 2.30pm
2 hours free parking on some sidewalks Monday to Saturday. Free parking on most sidewalks all day Sunday!
Walked to Fishermans Wharf.

Tip: Make sure you take advantage of some of the endless little pots of Clam Chowder restaurants give away along the pier.

Took the boardwalk to Cannery Row for Starbucks Coffee ($8).
Drove to Wholefoods Supermarket at Del Monte Center for provisions ($8).
Checked in to motel.

2 night stay at Pelican Inn Monterey priced at $110
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Good location for Highway 1 and downtown (1 mile from Fishermans Wharf and 500 metres from Wholefoods Supermarket

Day 5

Day exploring the Monterey and Carmel area.
1st stop Carmel by the Sea (beautiful beach with views of Pebble Beach Golf Resort and the village centre is lined with boutique shops and cafes).
Back to Monterey and parked at Downtown East Parking Lot (Great price – $7 for the day)
2nd stop Fishermans Wharf – Whale watching trip with Monterey Whale Watching ($100 for two tickets + $2 coffee on board).
Review: Brilliant! Big Boats, Really Friendly Knowledgeable Staff, Snack Bar On Board, Free Trip if No Whale Sightings (We saw Blue Whales and Humpbacks!).

Tip: If you are travelling out of season as we were, consider booking on the day and doing the midday trip (if you head down to the Wharf an hour before around 11am you can check if they have seen whales in the morning) also be aware that out of season they sometimes don’t have a trip in the late afternoon due to lack of customers.

3rd stop Fishermans Wharf for lunch at Scales Takeaway – Clam Chowder and Burgers ($27), Good food, seating outside, great place to people watch too!
4th stop Along Sunset Drive – Take the beach front drive from the top of Cannery Row down to Asilomar State Beach (Great sunset!).

Tip: We considered doing 17 mile drive, but after researching it seemed like we’d just see views available on Sunset Drive and Highway 1. Saving us the $10 fee too which paid for our next Starbucks!

Day 6

Left Pelican Inn Monterey at 8.30am heading for Yosemite National Park taking Highway 1 to Watsonville, 129 to River Oaks, 101 to Gilroy, 152 towards Fairmead, 59 to Merced and the 140 to Mariposa.

1st stop Gilroy to fill up with fuel ($37) and Walmart Superstore for provisions ($30).

2nd stop Yosemite National Park Entrance arrived at 2pm.
Purchased an America The Beautiful Pass ($80). Giving access to all National Parks in America for 12 months including Yosemite, Kings Canyon, Sequoia and Grand Canyon.

Took in the stunning scenery, lovely walks and watched the sunset before heading out of the park to our motel at Mariposa (1 hour drive from the park entrance).

2 night stay at Miners Inn Mariposa priced at $182
Review: Breakfast Included, Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi, Well Priced Accommodation For The Area

Day 7

A full day in Yosemite National Park (free entry due to purchasing the annual pass).

Walked the El Capitan trail and the hike up to Vernal and Nevada waterfalls at the other end of the park.
Picnic lunch at one of the most scenic part of the valley (along Ahwahnee Drive).
Left the valley at 2pm for the 1 hour drive up to Glacier Point to watch the sunset.
Stopped back down in the valley at El Capitan to watch the climbers on the wall at night (a very unusual experience).

Back to Mariposa and headed to the best Taco Truck in town for supper ($15)

Tip: If you like Mexican takeaway head to Taco Sonora for excellent Burritos located on Coakley Circle in Mariposa!

Day 8

Left Miners Inn Mariposa at 9am heading for Kings Canyon National Park taking the 49 South to Oakhurst, 41 South to Fresno and the 180 to Kings Canyon.

1st stop Mariposa town to fill up with fuel ($45) and Pioneer supermarket for provisions ($11).

2nd stop Kings Canyon National Park (free entry due to purchasing the annual pass) arrived at 1pm.

Tip: Make sure you have plenty of fuel for the trips in to the National Parks as there are no fuel stations in the park and the roads are slow, long and elevated.

Took the 180 around to Junction View for great views down to the Canyon and then drove to the car park at Kings Canyon Visitor Centre and took the footpath walk to The General Grant Tree (3rd largest tree in the world). Coffee back at the visitor centre ($3).
Headed to our motel in Visalia (great sunset drive on the way out of the park).

2 night stay at Lamp Liter Inn Visalia priced at $172
Review: Comfortable Bed, Nice and Clean, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi

Day 9

Took the 45 minute drive from Visalia taking the 198 West to Sequoia National Park (free entry due to purchasing the annual pass).

Visited the Giant Forest.
Walked the Congress Trail to see the largest tree in the world (General Sherman).
Walked the Moro Rock Trail.
Walked the Big Trees Trail.
Fantastic sunset views on the drive back down Highway 198.

Back to Visalia and headed to Walmart for provisions ($23)

Day 10

Left Lamp Liter Inn Visalia at 10am heading for Ridgecrest taking the 99 South to Bakersfield, 58 to Mojave and the 14 North to Ridgecrest passing Red Rock Canyon State Park.

1st stop Visalia town to fill up with fuel ($50).

2nd stop Red Rock Canyon State Park – location for many famous films including The Mummy, Planet of the Apes, Jurassic Park and many westerns including The Outlaw.

Continued on to Ridgecrest for Starbucks coffee ($8) and then to our motel.

1 night stay at Hotel Europa Ridgecrest priced at $48
Review: Please avoid this motel as it is very poorly maintained and we would NOT recommend it! Only good thing about it was that it had a washing machine and dryer – laundry done ($4)

Tip: Check out this link for other accommodation in Ridgecrest

Day 11

Left Hotel Europa Ridgecrest at 9.30am heading for Las Vegas taking the 395 South, 58 West to Barstow and the 15 to Las Vegas.

1st stop Barstow to fill up with fuel ($25) and for Starbucks Coffee ($8).

2nd stop Las Vegas – arrived at 2.30pm – Took the iconic drive up and down the length of the strip and parked up for the all important photo at the “Welcome to Vegas” sign before checking in to our hotel. Walked from the hotel to the Bellagio Fountains and central strip area (just a 10/15 minute walk from the hotel).

Returned to the Ellis Hotel Casino and Bar for our complimentary beer, followed by fabulous steaks at the Ellis Island Restaurant ($47)

2 night stay at Ellis Island Hotel Las Vegas priced at $139
Review: Excellent hotel and highly recommended, great price, very central (less than 15 minutes walk to the Belagio Fountains), great restaurant serving really well priced and great food, really friendly little casino, free beer on arrival, free hot drinks in reception, really well maintained clean rooms, lots of free parking and free good wifi

Day 12

Spent the full day in Las Vegas.

Walked to All The Main Themed Hotels including New York New York, The Bellagio, Caesars Palace, The Venetian and Paris.

Stopped for expensive Starbucks Coffee overlooking the Bellagio fountains ($11)

Watched the Volcano Erupting at The Mirage and the Fountains at the Bellagio after dark.

Walked back to Ellis Island Restaurant for fabulous salmon and burgers ($35)

Day 13

Left Ellis Island Hotel Las Vegas at 10.30am heading for Flagstaff taking the 93 South via the Hoover Dam, at Kingman taking Route 66 to Ash Fork and the 40 to Flagstaff.

1st stop the Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam Bridge.

Tip: As you enter the Hoover Dam there is a multi story car park charging $10, if you don’t mind a few minutes walk continue driving across the dam and follow the road up the hill and you will find 3 or 4 FREE car parks.

At Kingman we had Starbucks Coffee ($8) before taking a slight detour off Route 40 on to Route 66.

Arriving at Flagstaff at 8.15pm. Filled up with petrol ($30) and provisions at Walmart ($34)

2 night stay at Budget Inn Flagstaff priced at $91
Review: Comfortable Bed, Clean, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Good Wifi

Day 14

Left Flagstaff at 8.45am for the Grand Canyon National Park taking the 180 North and the 64 North, beautiful drive! Arrived at the Grand Canyon Village at 10.30am. (free entry due to purchasing the annual pass).

Spent the full day at the Grand Canyon South Rim. Coffee ($9)
Walked the South Rim Trail and watched the sunset at the Canyon.

Back to Flagstaff and headed for Taco Bell takeaway which was an extremely poor meal ($10)

Day 15

Left Flagstaff at 8.45am for Barstow taking Route 66 and Route 40 West (350 mile drive!)

Took the iconic drive along Route 66 for 100 miles (Ash Fork to Kingman). Stopped for Starbucks Coffee at Kingman ($9)

Tip: Make sure you have plenty of fuel when you leave Kingman. As the fuel stations from Kingman to Barstow are really expensive (double the price!) We found out the hard way! ($35) for less than half a tank.

Arrived at Barstow at 4pm. Checked in to our motel for the night.

1 night stay at Economy Inn Barstow priced at $45
Review: In Need Of Refurbishment, Comfortable Bed, Coffee in Reception, Free Parking, Free Wifi. Wouldn’t really recommend it unless it was much cheaper than anything else in Barstow.

Tip: Check out this link for other accommodation in Barstow

Day 16

Left Barstow at 9am for the Los Angeles Observatory taking Route 15 South, Route 10 West and Route 5 North arriving at 11.30am.

As we were a little short of time as we had to get the hire car back to the airport we paid ($10) to park in the Observatory Car Park.

Tip: If you have time and don’t mind a 20 minute up hill walk you can park for free at the Greek Theatre car park, the car park will be closed though if there is a show on.

Left for the airport at 2pm taking Route 5 South, Route 10 West and the 405 South to the Airport, dropping the hire car off at 3.30pm.

Trip Summary

Total Miles Driven: 2629
Total Cost of Trip: £3074 ($3843 USD)
Trip Highlights: Highway 1, Solvang, Elephant Seal Beach, Big Sur, Monterey and Carmel, Yosemite National Park, Kings Canyon, Sequoia National Park, Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, Route 66
Trip Dates: 31st October to 15th November 2019

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How to Travel Thailand For 2 Months

On the 14th November 2017 we flew to Bangkok, the start of our 54 day tour of Thailand.

The 54 Day Itinary:

Bangkok – 14th November to 9th November
Pattaya – 19th November to 26th November
Bang Tao – 27th November to 3rd December
Phuket – 3rd December to 8th December
Kata – 8th December to 14th December
Phi Phi Islands – 14th December to 17th December
Krabi – 17th December to 24th December
Koh Samui – 24th December to 4th January
Surat Thani – 4th January to 5th January

Bangkok – 14th November to 9th November – (5 nights) Accommodation: MADERLA GUEST HOUSE – price 4000 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See List: The Grand Palace, Floating Market, Wat Pho, Wat Traimit, Lumphini Park, China Town, Khao San.

Our location was perfect for Lumphini Park as Maderla Guest House was just a 10 minute walk away, the MRT station was also on the same road to the park, taking you into the heart of the city. Lumphini was a great place to chill and eat a bit of street food on the way back from a busy day site seeing, a quiet area of green space with a lake and home to a number of rather large Monitor Lizards. The sites of Patpong Night Market and the Skybar Bangkok were both within walking distance too!

You can actually walk from Maderla, through China Town and down to the river, head along the riverside and you will eventually arrive at Wat Pho and the Reclining Buddha, walk a little further and you will reach The Grand Palace. The sites of ‘Khao San Road’ are a little further on than that, so most of the attractions are pretty central and fairly close to each other. If we didn’t feel like the long walk down to the river we picked up the MRT blue line across the road from Lumphini Park and in two stops we were pretty near the river.

This was quite a walk and we ended up getting a ‘Tuk Tuk’ back. However, from experience, we don’t recommend getting a Tuk Tuk, as the fumes and traffic make it a very unpleasant experience, we recommend taking the MRT instead!

The final thing to see on our list was a floating market. There are a few dotted around the outskirts of Bangkok and we’d done a bit of research before hand. Many people had said how packed with tourists the most popular Damnoen Saduak floating market was and the fact that it was a 100 km bus journey put us off a little. We chose Taling Chan Floating Market as it was a smaller one, still had the stalls and enough boats for the photo opportunities, but had the added attraction of always being able to get good seats on the floating restaurants and it was just 14 km from the centre of Bangkok. We weren’t disappointed, really easy to get to with a trip on the sky train across Bangkok and a quick taxi ride, enough atmosphere and stalls so you felt like you were at a floating market, great food cooked straight off the boats and to top it all off a really good boat trip up the river and back. All in all a good day out and highly recommended.

Travelled Bangkok to Pattaya – Taxi with ‘Toms Taxi Pattaya’ – 1200 THB one way – very decent comfortable taxi with air-con, pick up on time and safe driver – recommended!

Pattaya – 19th November to 26th November – (7 nights) Accommodation: Z BY ZING – price 4086 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) – GREAT VALUE! Things to See and Do List: Jomtien Beach, Thai Massage, Walking Street, Jomtien Night Market.

We headed down to Pattaya knowing that we didn’t have too much on our list of things to see and do, so were looking forward to a bit of a relaxing week. We opted for Z by Zing which turned out to be in a great and quiet location but just a 3 minute walk to Jomtien Beach.

Tip: Take advantage of the 10 Baht bus, they run up and down the promenade and take you round to Walking Street and Pattaya Central Beach. One trip costs 10 Baht how ever far you want to go!

Jomtien Beach is OK but not one of the best in Thailand. The promenade stretches the length of the beach and there are some pretty good and very well priced restaurants along the front. We even found a bar that had a ‘Happy Hour’! There are plenty of places to get a massage, we opted for a full Thai Massage, as it was on our to do list …… most painful hour of Jonathan’s life! Jomtien night market is good and has some really cheap clothing. Some great food stalls and and they even have seating overlooking the beach where you can take your freshly cooked Pad Thai, Grilled Prawns, Snapper or anything else that takes your fancy and eat it overlooking the ocean, pretty cool!

Travelled Pattaya to Bangkok – Taxi with ‘Toms Taxi Pattaya’ – 1600 THB one way – very decent comfortable taxi with air-con, pick up on time and safe driver – recommended!

Bangkok – 26th November to 27th November – (1 night) Accommodation: THIP MANSION DON MUENG AIRPORT – price 890 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Review: Nice modern room, good wifi, great bathroom. Walking distance to the airport and great little roadside restaurants. Recommended!

Travelled By Air – Flight from Don Mueang Airport (DMK) to Phuket (HKT) – total 1000 THB per person – Great little airline and bargain flight tickets – not sure how they do it so cheaply!

Phuket Airport to Bang Tao – Pre-booked Taxi with ‘Hopper Taxi’ – 880 THB one way – very decent comfortable taxi with air-con, pick up on time and safe driver – recommended!

Bang Tao – 27th November to 3rd December – (6 nights) Accommodation: BANGTAO GUEST HOUSE – price 5590 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See and Do List: Bang Tao Beach, Chang Thale Beach, Banana Beach, Naithon Beach, Surin Beach, Wat Phra Nang Sang, Tonsai Waterfall, Bang Tao Night Market.

Our accommodation at Bangtao Guest House was in a great location for the price, we could walk to beautiful Bang Tao beach in 20 minutes and a 10 minute walk the other way took us to the main road lined with restaurants and shops. Bang Tao beach is great, a long white sand stretch with really clear water, great for swimming. There are a good selection of beach bars, restaurants and water sports.

Tip: We found a great little bar on the way down from our accommodation just a few minutes walk from the beach (no sea view) but it had HAPPY HOUR drinks! It’s called “Tasty Bangtao” and in the same area is Rim Klong Cafe that does the most amazing Mango and Coconut rice. Keep your eye out for them if your in the neighbourhood!

The accommodation had well priced mopeds for hire so we took advantage of this and rented one to explore the area further. We headed up the coast to Chang Thale Beach, a really lovely tree lined beach and then on to the secret cove “Banana Beach” which had a lovely little restaurant overlooking the ocean. We continued up to Naithon Beach. Its a really beautiful scenic ride along this part of the coast road.

At the end of Naithon we headed inland and rode through the countryside to our next stop which was Wat Phra Nang Sang and then to Tonsai Waterfall before taking the 4030 back to Bang Tao. We finished the day by riding the coast road along Bangtao. A really great day out!

Bangtao to Patong – local taxi – 420 THB one way

Patong – 3rd December to 8th December – (5 nights) Accommodation: ANGELINA GUEST HOUSE – price 3000 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See and Do List: Patong Beach, Bangla Road, Phuket Simon Cabaret, Patong Night Market.

Our next few days were spent in the lively resort of Patong, Angelina Guest House was actually in a great location at the edge of town, in a relatively quiet location, yet an easy walk to the centre and the beach. On our must do list while in Thailand was to go to a lady-boy show. We researched the best shows in Thailand and Phuket Simon Cabaret was right up there, so we pre-booked tickets. It just happened that the theatre was only a 15 minute walk away too! It was a great show and you really couldn’t tell that these ladies were actually fellas! After the show we headed back to Patong Food Market for some BBQ mackerel, papaya salad, pad thai and green curry.

We had a very interesting evening visiting the very popular Bangla Road, full of restaurants, bars and clubs. We just couldn’t decide which ping pong show to go and see!

Patong to Kata – local taxi – 250 THB one way

Kata – 8th December to 14th December – (6 nights) Accommodation: LE THALASSA KATA – price 6600 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See and Do List: Big Buddha Phuket, Karon View Points, Kata Noi View Point, Kata Night Market.

We planned to have a couple of relaxing days by the beach in Kata. Its a great place to chill out for a few days and you can view the most amazing sunsets from Kata Beach. There are a couple of restaurants at one end serving some great food and cold beers. We just struck luck with an annual street fayre taking place along the path directly opposite the beach. Some great street food was on offer and we took advantage of a couple of evenings eating street food on the beach watching the sun go down. We felt like we were really living the dream!

Just across the road from our guest house was a moped hire shop, so we took advantage of a couple of days hire. This enabled us to visit Big Buddha, high up in the hills of Phuket, a brilliant ride with stunning views. On the way back we stopped of at Kata Noi View Point, there are a couple of restaurants up the top where if you time it right you can get a front line table for magnificent sunset views while sipping a cold beer!

We had time while we had the scooter to also hunt out some of the areas more secluded beaches and some more amazing views including the Karon View Point. Our few days in Kata would not have been complete without a visit to Kata Night Market for some more brilliant street food!

Kata to Phi Phi Islands – we arranged our transfers to the Phi Phi Islands directly with Phuket Ferry, who provided a brilliant and smooth service. Picking us up at our accommodation in Kata, taking us straight to Rassada Pier in Phuket and a smooth crossing over to Tonsai Pier, Phi Phi Islands – Total cost 1200 THB for 2 people one way. Highly Recommended!

Phi Phi Islands – 14th December to 17th December – (3 nights) Accommodation: PHI PHI ANDAMAN LEGACY RESORT – price 6000 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See and Do List: Boat Trip To Maya Bay, Snorkelling, Hike To View Point, Explore The Island, Enjoy The Nightlife.

We arrived at Phi Phi Island at 2pm and a member of Phi Phi Andaman Legacy Resort hotel staff was waiting for us to ferry our luggage to the hotel (great service). After checking in we had a wander through the narrow streets checking out restaurants for the evening. We found a great little place overlooking the sea, called Tonsai Seafood, which had a happy hour beers and a really well priced menu.

Our next day started really early, after a good breakfast at the hotel we headed down to the pier for our longtail boat trip around Maya Bay. We had researched a few trips before hand and read some really good reviews about Mr Chet’s trips, a little more expensive than some of the other longtail boat trip quotes we received but we went with him based on the reviews and correspondence we had with him prior to booking. We have to say he was absolutely brilliant and one of the highlights of our entire Thailand trip. The 5 hour trip with lunch cost us 3400 THB for 2 people. We headed out to Maya Bay for snorkelling before heading to the beach for lunch, more snorkelling at Shark Reef and then a stop off at Monkey Beach on the way back to Phi Phi. A really well organised trip with a really experienced guide, took us to uncrowded locations and took lots of photos above and underwater that we could access after the trip finished and was happy to take any photos for us with our camera during the trip too. Really highly recommended!

Arriving back to shore early afternoon gave us time to make the hike up to Phi Phi view point giving us fabulous views over the island and the ocean. You’ll find plenty of nightlife on the island, from fire shows on the beach to music clubs in the centre of town. Phi Phi really has got it all and the island really was one of the highlights of Thailand for us!

Phi Phi Islands to Krabi – again we arranged our transfers to Krabi directly with Phuket Ferry, who provided a brilliant and smooth service. Taking us by boat from Tonsai Pier to Klong Jilad Pier, Krabi and then a taxi on to our accommodation in Krabi Town – Total cost 1600 THB for 2 people one way. Highly Recommended!

Krabi – 17th December to 24th December – (7 nights) Accommodation: HOP INN KRABI – price 5600 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price) Things to See and Do List: River Trip, Khao Khanab Nam Caves, Thai Cooking Class, Krabi Night Market, Railay and Ao Nang Beach, Wat Tham Seua Krabi, Hot Springs.

Arriving at our accommodation Hop Inn Krabi around 7pm we took the 5 minute walked straight in to town to find somewhere to eat. We noticed a street vendor selling Chicken Noodle Soup and seemed really busy, so we decided to go for it. We are not sure of the name, as it wasn’t on his cart but he was on the same street corner every night, keep an eye out for him as the soup was excellent!

Having a week in Krabi gave us chance to hire a scooter for a couple of days. On the first day we headed out to explore Railay and Ao Nang beaches. With stunning scenery along the route we spent the day driving along the coast as far as Hat Noppharet Thara and Mu Koh Phi Phi National Park. A beautiful area of natural forest and un-spoilt beaches.

On the second day we took an inland route and headed to Wat Tham Seua Krabi (Tiger Cave Temple). We climbed the 1260 steps, passing the local monkeys on the way, to the top where the Golden Buddha has commanding views over the area. Before we left we visited the tiger cave temple. We then headed to Krabi Hot Springs and Emerald Pool. Well worth a visit the hot springs are great, especially after climbing 1260 steps earlier in the day!

We took a river boat upstream to Khao Khanab Nam Caves, through the mangroves and on to fishing village, where the whole village live in houses in the middle of the river, making a living from catching fish for the local restaurants. In the evening we headed to Krabi Night Market for some more great Thai food.

Before we left Krabi we had one more thing left on our list to do, a Thai Cooking Class! We did a bit of research before hand and found one that picked up from the hotel, had small group numbers and had some great reviews. We certainly struck lucky, we had a brilliant half day. We booked through Cookly and went for the Smart Cook Thai Cookery School. We had a really good experience with a great teacher! There are lots of other classes available on Cookly depending on how long a class you want, how much you want to spend and if you want to include a market visit to buy the produce.

Krabi to Koh Samui – we arranged our transfers to the Koh Samui directly with Seatran Discovery, who provided a brilliant and smooth service. Picking us up at our accommodation in Krabi, taking us overland to Donsak Pier, Surat Thani and a smooth crossing over to Nathon Pier, Koh Samui – Total cost 1695 THB for 2 people one way. Highly Recommended! There are plenty of taxis waiting at Koh Samui Pier. We managed to share the cost of a taxi with two other couples going to Bophut who were on the same boat as us.

Koh Samui – 24th December to 4th January – (6 nights) Accommodation: RIVIERA BEACH BOPHUT – price 21150 THB for Room With Private Bathroom (total price). Things to See and Do List: Fisherman’s Beach Restaurants and Night Market, Big Buddha, Lad Koh View Point, Lipa Noi, Lamai and Chaweng Beaches.

We really pushed the boat out with our accommodation at Riviera Beach Bophut with it being our final part of the Thailand journey. We had 6 nights in a room overlooking the village and then upgraded to a sea view room for the remaining 5 nights. Highly recommend the sea view rooms, waterfront position with amazing views of the ocean and sunsets.

Fisherman’s beach is a great location, with the main street being lined with some really good restaurants, coffee houses and boutique shops. The beach is a sandy strip and the beach side restaurants and bars have made the most of this by offering waterfront dining and tables chairs on the beach itself.

We recommend the happy hour cocktails at Copacabana, Some really good set menu seafood deals at The Address and a really cool vibe at Coco Tam’s. For coffee we really liked Tanpopo Cafe, beachfront on the edge of town and also Fisherman’s House Cafe for nice of coffee and good breakfasts too!

To explore the island you really need to hire a moped, we got a pretty decent one from Phusit Motorbike. You can ride round the island in a day, we had the bike a couple of days and visited Big Buddha, Lad Koh View Point, Lipa Noi, Lamai and Chaweng Beaches on the first day. We headed up in to the hills on the second day, where there was fantastic scenery and great coastal views. Its well worth getting out and exploring the island! Bophut Night Market is pretty good too, some really great food stalls. A few more Koh Samui highlights below.

Again for our return ferry from Koh Samui to Surat Thani – we arranged our transfers directly with Seatran Discovery – Total cost 1695 THB for 2 people one way. Highly Recommended!

From Surat Thani Airport, AirAsia who we used for our internal flights, offer cheap flights back to Bangkok International for a connecting flight to most places in the world, or as we did, why not extend your stay in Asia by flying to Kuala Lumpur and then on to the beautiful city of Singapore.

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Ways To Save While Travelling

Many call them “Travel Hacks” and boy are there some good ones out there. Lets run through a collection of some of the best we’ve tried and found successful in saving a bit while we travel.

Some of the little more obvious.

1.) Book your accommodation early or last minute and use a comparison site to find the best deal.

We always book accommodation as early as possible, from our experience this is one of the best times to bag a deal. However, we cover all angles by always booking a free cancellation accommodation offer when booking so far in advance. This gives us the flexibility of locking in a great deal, changing our mind right up to a few days before as sometimes travel plans change. Plus this allows you to keep an eye out for any better accommodation bargains, while knowing you have something in the bag.

2.) Book accommodation with some kind of cooking equipment.

The minimum we look for is a fridge in any accommodation we book! If there is a microwave then happy days! Save a fortune on eating and drinking out by getting stuff from the supermarket and prepare your own meals. Many times we’ve taken the ingredients for a pretty good meal back with us for much less than a fiver!

3.) Avoid shopping and eating in the tourist centres.

Pretty obvious really but the number of times we’ve sat down at those cool seats for a photo opportunity in a main square of a city with a dish of tapas while sipping a beer, to be charge €15 or more! Take a cool quick selfie in the square and then head down one of the side streets where a beer and tapas will be a fraction of the price, that’s the answer!

4.) Take advantage of discounts and freebies.

As soon as we know we’re going to be staying somewhere we do our research and check out any discounts or freebies we might be able to get our hands on. Groupon and Smartsave can often be good for discount vouchers.
Contact the local tourist board for any voucher leaflets or local discount codes. Do an internet search “discounts and freebies” for the area you are visiting and you’ll be surprised what might come up. You’ll often find FREE walking tours and attractions such as art gallery entrance, but most cities are overflowing with free and low-cost offers, anything from restaurants to tourist attractions.

5.) Take advantage of the experts in the area.

Do an internet search for your area and look for travel blogs! You’ll find there will be some really informative blogs out there written by people who have already been to the area and have lots of tips of anything from cheap eats to must see’s! Bloggers are often on a budget too, so they’ll often recommend good value places.

Little less obvious ways to save while you travel.

1.) Save your paid data and find all the free wifi.

Check out Foursquare, the travel app where people share tips, ratings and reviews on places to go near you. Check out the tips section as you’ll often find posts on where to locate free wifi close to you and wifi passwords for some of those not so generous hotspots. Another great little App is wifimap – go surf for free!

2.) Travel light.

We can’t tell you the amount of times we’ve packed more clothes than we need and those just in case items, that just stay in the case! Travelling light has its obvious advantage that its easy to carry, but the lighter you travel the cheaper you travel you might well get away with just carry on luggage on flights or coach journey’s.

3.) Try and be flexible with your travel days.

Whether you need a bus, train or plane ticket try to be flexible with your departure date as a day or two’s difference can often bag a cheaper rate.

Another little hack to remember, when browsing for travel tickets make sure you use the nifty little “incognito browser”. If you’re using Windows, Linux, or Chrome OS: Press Ctrl + Shift + n. If you’re using a Mac: Press ⌘ + Shift + n. Amazingly, now days, websites can tell that you have visited them and been searching for transport and if you’re searching around and come back for a second search on the same site many of them have an automated system that will increase the fare prices that you see the second time. By browsing “Incognito” the website’s can’t track that you’ve visited them already and they can’t increase the prices. Not sure how long this will last before they find a loophole!

4.) Get the best exchange rates for your money.

We’ve been using Revolut for all our travel currency needs. Grab yourself one of their bank cards which you can load up in your local currency via the app, then each time you want to change currency you can get some of the best rates around. We find the advantages are that it’s free to use, great exchange rates on a number of currencies, you can transfer money from and to the card at the touch of a button and you even get a monthly allowance of free cash withdrawals.

5.) The Best way to save on accommodation costs.

Our final tip and one that has saved us thousands in accommodation costs, its not so much a travel hack but possibly one of the best ways to save while you travel. House and Pet Sitting, a great way to see new places, just pay for your transport and food, stay in some great locations and immerse yourself in local life! Read more at Tips For House and Pet Sitting.

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How To Fund A Life Of Travel

This has to be one of the most commonly asked questions and one that I came most obsessed about prior to our life changing attempt to become Digital Nomads ……. Just how are we going to fund our life of travel?

After reading numerous blogs on the subject it was clear that most digital nomads are funding themselves through the power of blogging and social media, freelance remote working or having a website selling products, advice or both!

And how we fund our Location Independent lifestyle has been from building niche blogs and websites, along with pet and house sitting to save heaps of money on accommodation! We’ve even done matched betting for 8 months and earned £5000 tax free. And I’ll be completely honest with you, all of which I had no previous experience of ….. so if I can do it anyone can!

OK then, so how do I get a piece of that action? ….. Excellent question! ….. And one I hope to answer in an honest and realistic way!

An Introduction To Blogging

Firstly lets delve a little deeper into blogging and how money is made from it.

In a nutshell, someone sets up a blog on a particular subject, “in our case The Travelling Pet Sitters” is our blog”. They then write “interesting” blog posts “in our case this one” ….. OK give it time as it will get more interesting I promise!

So, within that blog post they include links to affiliate programmes “in our case lets give you this link – Join The Largest Pet Sitting Website in the World“. Now when you are reading this blog post and come to the interesting link we’ve given you above, you might click on it and find it interesting enough to want to join “The Pet Sitting Website”. If you join it then “Ka-ching” …… we get a small payment and we can eat tonight!

OK, brilliant, so we now know how money is made through blogging but how do we go about setting it up?

Blimey, I thought I’d finished the blog post as you’d clicked my link “and joined the pet sitting website” …… but I’m pleased you’re still with me …… I told you if you gave it time this blog post would get more interesting!

Right then, lets crack on with how we go about setting up some kind of website/blog with links on it that generate some cash for you if someone clicks on those special little links!

Coming Up With An Idea

Possibly the most important thing to think about is to try and choose something that you are really interested in to form the basis of your blog or website. As an example, say I’m interested in fishing …….. from that idea, I could build an online business that included links to fishing tackle shops, fishing books, fishing holidays, advertise fishing lakes and probably a few more if I really thought about it.

So firstly then, think of a business and write down ideas of what kind of things you could sell, as I have above.

OK then, let me guess …… you’re going to set up a blog on fishing? No …… oh good, that means you’ve really thought about it and you’ve come up with a great idea. So lets move on and help you get building that idea into a business!

To continue head on over to our blog “Setting Up A Blog“, where you’ll be able to find a guide to setting up your first blog absolutely FREE!

Also pop your head in at our blog “Setting Up An Online Business” for more tips on setting up affiliate businesses!

Finally take a look at our post “SEO Tips For Bloggers” that helps you with getting your blog noticed online!

Just one more thing before you head off …….. I did say I would be honest, so here is a bit of advice …….. don’t expect to set up a blog this week and be earning anything from it straight away. Earning money from a blog takes lots of time and effort, but having said that you certainly can make money, so work hard at it and with a little luck success will follow!

So Now You’ve Told Us It Might Take Ages For A Blog To Make Money, How Else Could We Fund Our Life Of Travel?

Still here then!

Well, OK, if you don’t have time to build a blog then lets go through a few more ideas of how you might be able generate some funds to keep those travels going!

There are lots of ways of earning money online, some need plenty of computer coding or design experience, but others anyone can turn their hand too!

So lets go take a look at just what’s out there!

Good At Fancy Writing and Spelling, Then Maybe Copy Editing Could Be For You – this entails reviewing written material and checking for factual accuracy, spelling, grammar and readability. So if you’ve got an A in English Grammar or can read and spell good this might be for you! To find work as a freelance copy editor or proof reader, you can check out major job sites including LinkedIn, FlexJobs, Monster, ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder and Indeed. You can also research freelance sites, such as FlexJobs, Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, Freelanced, PeoplePerHour, FreelanceWritingGigs, Super Copy Editors, Mediabistro and Global

Can You Speak A Second Language? Well How About Translating – use your language skills to translate audio recordings, written documents and videos. Most of the job sites listed in the previous section also list translation work, but also check out the following translation specialist sites Proz, Unbabel, Gengo, Upwork, Lingosaur, Stepes and Speakt

Are You An Expert Or Have Loads Of Experience In Any Field? – maybe you have one of them fancy degrees and could make use of it by coaching or consulting in high-skilled areas, such as accounting, marketing or a host of other possibilities. Check out the Freelancer Marketplace, Clarity, Zeqr, JustAnswer, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk , Amazon Home Services and Upwork

Share Your Wealth Of Knowledge, By Creating An Online Course – how about creating online courses in your area of expertise (e.g. personal finance, public speaking, life coaching, financial literacy) on one of the many online learning platforms, such as Udemy, Zeqr, Skillshare, Teachable and Uscreen

Sharing That Wealth Of Knowledge You Have May Also Be Possible Through Writing An E-Book On The Subject – It seems to me a great opportunity this one and I’m going to try it out myself pretty soon, Head on over to Amazon Kindle Publishing to take a look at how it works

Had Some Teaching Experience Or One Of Them Sneaky TEFL Qualifications Stuffed In Your Bottom Draw? – virtual teaching has become a popular way to work remotely using FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts and other technologies to communicate with students. Some English tutoring companies to research are VIPKid, Englishunt, Topic-Time, Twosigmas, Lingoda, Funbulous and Verbling

Gotta Bit Of Computer Admin Skills, Then Data Entry Work Might Be Up Your Street – quite simply this involves putting info into a computer – create a profile on freelance job
sites, such as Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, The Smart Crowd, Fiverr, Working Solutions, Clickworker and Microworkers

Like Me If Your Prepared To Give Anything A Go Then There’s Matched Betting – this is a clever technique where you can make money from bookmakers promotions. I’ve actually done this and in 8 months earned £5000 – read all about it here

Are You Pretty Handy With A Camera And Got An Eye For A Good Photo Or Video Clip – then why not consider selling them online to the worlds largest creative community. Head on over to Adobe Stock and Getty Images to find out more

I’ve Put This Way Down The Bottom Of The List, But You May Have Heard Of “Paid Online Surveys” – you can earn extra income for completing surveys and various questionnaires. Now the reason I’ve put this so far down is that I’ve actually tried these and to be honest I reckon you might be able to earn enough for a couple of beers each day if you work on them all day. It’s not really a big money spinner, but when in need. Check out Inbox Pounds, Pinecone Research, Swagbucks, Survey Junkie, Prizerebel, Survey Club, Panda Research

Similar To Doing Surveys, This Could Be A Way Of Earning A Few Quid Working Remotely – these companies pays you to test out websites and apps and record your results. I’ve not got round to trying this one out yet, but if you fancy taking a look and do give me your feedback if it earns you any cash. Check out Usertesting, Userlytics, TryMyUI, Userfeel, TestingTime

If Your Interested In Music And Fancy Being Paid To Review Unsigned Bands and Artists – this company pays you for the reviews. I’m informed it can take a while to build up your reputation and the payments are pretty small, but this along with other things could bring in a few quid a month. Check it out at Slicethepie

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Setting Up A Free Website

Setting up a website is now days a pretty easy task. I had no experience of web design when I set up my first website over 10 years ago. Yes it was very basic but it worked. That website is still running today and its called Estartit Holidays

Since those days website building has become much much easier and now anyone with no experience can build a beautiful looking website that looks great on a computer screen, tablet and even a phone.

So lets takes you through making a website in just a few EASY steps!

1.) Decide on your website name – personally I think this is pretty important as it tells people what your website is about. We have picked names for our website which gives people an idea of what they will see on the website. (for example http://www.theglobalpetsitters.com and http://www.villacanaholidays.co.uk) both very different websites but you get the idea of what they are about just from the name.

A good name can also help with Search Engine Optimisation (this is how you get found in google, yahoo and the other search engines people use) don’t worry we’ll cover this in SIMPLE terms in another blog once you have set up your website.

This useful web name checker can tell you whether the name you are interested in is available.

Also decide on whether you want a .com or .co.uk webname. A co.uk is probably a good idea if the website visitors you want to visit your site are going to mainly from the UK. If you are looking to attract visitors to your website from other parts of the world, then a .com would be a better option.

2.) Once you have decided on your web name and checked it is available, you are ready to build your website. Building your website has become so much easier than it ever used to be. I’m assuming you are reading this blog as you are relatively new to website building and want the easiest way to set one up.

So lets make it easy! My suggestion is to use a web building programme, not only is easy to use but its also very cheap or can even be free (I’ll explain the free option shortly). Website building programmes enable you to simply design and create your own website.

I’ve tried a few website building programmes and my first choice for designing really great website very easily is Weebly. There are others that are pretty good too. Here are a few suggestions

We’ll use Weebly as its my first choice to show you what’s possible to make your own website easily.

Just to show you how easy it is take a look at https://largevillarentals.weebly.com/

This is a website I set up recently and I did it totally for FREE. I’ll show you how to set up an account and get going shortly, but just to explain how you can have a FREE website. https://largevillarentals.weebly.com/ is free because if you take a look at the webname, instead of paying for a webname such as www.largevillarentals.com, I have used Weebly’s free option which just includes the word .weebly in the webname and they allow you to have this for FREE. I explain this in a little more detail as we set up an account.

So lets set up a FREE Weebly Website!

1.) Go to the Weebly website at “www.weebly.com“. You will see an account creation form with three fields (Full Name, Email and Password), as well as a few other buttons (this includes the “Log In” button).

2.) Sign up for a Weebly account. In each field in the short account creation form to the left, type in your full name, email address and password. Be sure to write these details down so you don’t forget them next time you want to log in. Once each of these steps has been completed, click on “Sign up. It’s FREE!” You may well be asked to verify yourself once you click the sign up button (this is really simple just follow the instruction on the screen – this is just asked to make sure you are a real person).