We live for free in other people’s houses.

We constantly travel the country staying in the homes of people who are themselves traveling while looking after those homes and caring for the homeowners’ pets. We become substitute homeowners while the true homeowners travel. In the three plus years that we’ve been house sitting, we’ve stayed in the most beautiful homes on Hilton Head Island and Sanibel Island on the east coast, and in San Clemente and Pebble Beach within sight of the Pacific. We’ve lived briefly in large condominiums in Boston and San Francisco, and in much larger homes in Fort Lauderdale and Las Vegas plus suburban homes near Washington, Atlanta, Orlando, Houston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We’ve crisscrossed the country living in other people’s homes.

While we’re living for free in beautiful homes, we don’t own them (or rent them), and we don’t have any of the headaches, burdens, and complications of home ownership. Someone else is paying the mortgage and property taxes. Someone else is maintaining and repairing the house. If it’s damaged in a storm, someone else will repair it. If it’s washed away in a flood or wrecked in an earthquake, it’s a matter for someone else.

We’ve never been in any one house long enough to grow tired of the house or bored with being there. Often we’re sorry to leave a house when the house sitting assignment ends, but that’s the right emotion to feel when you’ve enjoyed your stay but are forced to pack and go. Yet that emotion is always overtaken by the excitement of heading to a new place and another house sit. We always have that next house and that next town to look forward to. When we leave one home, we’re always headed out on the road to someplace new.

You know that feeling you get when you return home from a long trip — you’re back in the house you love, you partially unpack, you take a hot shower, and you crawl into your own bed for the first time in weeks? We never get that feeling. We have no home to return to. Instead, what we get repeatedly is the feeling you get when you leave on a vacation and the whole adventure lies ahead of you. Every time we leave one house sit for another, we feel like we’re leaving on another vacation. Every day is different from the ones before and the ones that are ahead.

There’s also this feeling that we’re getting away with something. Living free, staying in beautiful homes each night. That’s not the way things are supposed to work. That’s not the way life is for everyone else. While we’re incredibly grateful to the kind people who invite us to house sit and entrust us with their homes, and are just as grateful for this nomadic life we’ve carved out for ourselves, we’re always followed around by the feeling that we’re getting away with something we shouldn’t.