How do you vacation with all of the animals?

[Chickerdoodle13]

Vacation? We don't! LOL

My family actually does vacation every few years, but it takes WEEKS to make plans for the animals before actually going away. My dad will not trust the care of our pets to just anyone, so usually our vacations are planned around the schedules of our animal caretakers! It's also not cheap. We usually pay $100 or so to each person (Person who takes care of the inside animals and one for the outside animals) for the entire week. Sometimes it is more. A professional animal sitter will charge much more than just that though!

 

[Dawn419]

No vacations here either! I'd suffer from separation anxiety!

Dawn

 

[kstaven]

Why would I want to vacation when I can have so much fun with all the animals? Much less stressful than people.

 

[Dawn419]

Quote:
Amen!!!

That summed it up in an egg shell (pun intended)!

Dawn

 

[Chickadee28]

We are going to Hawaii in June. I am having my sister come stay at our home. I am paying her what it would cost me to board 3 dogs for 8 days plus some extra for taking care of the chickens. She is a teacher so she is off in the summers. She will make quite a bit of money and I will have the peace of mind that my pets are safe.

We have another week long trip to Minnesota planned in July with all the family(sis included), my best friend who lives down the street is taking care of the chickens and the dogs will go to the kennel. I feel bad about having them go the kennel for a week, but this place is like a dog spa, they should be fine. I am looking at different options for my 2lb chihuahua, I am very nervous about kenneling him for so long. Last time he stayed overnight they kept him in the cat room

 

[DLS]

My son comes over & feeds the dogs.... Looks like he will have to feed 25 chickens this jan.also. The only time the kennel slacks off a little is mid Jan & we just don't take any reservations.. leaves us wuth JUST our animals...I have been looking at trying one of my deer scatter feeders for scattering chicken feed you can program it for how long & what time of the day to scatter Ill bet the hens will love that .. Now if i can figgure out a automatic waterer

 

[TheMartianChick]

I'm sorry that it took me so long to get back to this topic... You've given me some really good ideas.

Like Speckledhen, we believe that we will be moving to an area that other people only get to vacation in. So we won't feel the need to make frequent trips. We'd like to make our home as peaceful and relaxing as possible. However, I would like to be able to return to NY for some of the holidays, college graduations and to visit with my husband's grandkids. Although we hope that there wouldn't be any emergencies to cause us to come back to NY, we know that reality dictates that there would be some.

Since our own kids will be grown, we will be less likely to take as many big vacations and (depending upon the price of gas) will be more likely to spend some time exploring our new region of the country, just as we have explored the northeast. This might mean that some of our trips would be just a few days at a time.

Henry brought up a good point about sharing milking duties with other farmers. We would probably want to join a local farming group anyway and maybe we could come to some sort of arrangement.

We tend to like big dogs (german shepherds), so we've decided not to have a dog any time soon because of the cost of a kennel and not wanting to have an outdoor dog cooped up. In NY, my hubby's brother always takes care of our elderly shepherd when we travel.

The prices that others have mentioned in this topic and the other one posted by patandchickens lead me to think that we could afford to pay someone to do the work. However, we are supposed to be trying to downsize our lifestyle and get more in tune with nature. As part of the downsizing, a chunk of our income would disappear, so it is hard to say if we would really have ANY extra money.

I like the idea that chickadee28 had about hiring her sister, the teacher to take care of the animals. My youngest daughter is planning to become a music teacher. (In about 6 years) she will have her summers off and probably wouldn't mind coming for a visit and taking care of our animals. She'd probably do it for free, too! Of course we'd have to get through the next 6 years, though...

kstaven... I know that you're right about animals being less stressful than humans... One of the reasons that we'd like to move is to put a little space between us and the people that we know. We hope that this will enable us to actually miss them and that we will better appreciate eachother when we do finally get to visit NY! City living really drives me crazy...everybody gets in your business!