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!
