Carol & Richard

We are a recently retired professional couple who live in an apartment on the river on the edge of the Brisbane CBD. While we love our city life, and have lived in our apartment since 1999, we also love spending time in rural and regional Australia. This may stem from the fact that we were both brought up in towns in regional Queensland.

Over the last 10 years we have spent an increasing amount of time visiting places all around the country. We don’t do it to tick boxes – we actually enjoy spending time in these towns. To that end, we have usually sought out self-contained accommodation so that we can “live like a local” for a few days, shop in the local community and cook for ourselves using local produce. But the length of those stays have, in the past, been limited by work commitments.

Now that those commitments have ceased, we want to spend more time in other communities around Australia and hope that house sitting might provide us with that opportunity.

Spending more time in one place will also afford Carol more time to engage in her photography hobby, whether that be shooting bugs in gardens or the milky way in dark skies away from the cities.

While we do not have a garden in our high-rise apartment, we have no issue with looking after other people’s gardens, from watering plants through to mowing if needed.

We also enjoy our other capital cities, but whenever we visit them, we also try for self-contained accommodation away from the CBD so we can again “live like a local”.