Following a little over two weeks of leisure travel, we drove to our next house sit, in the Berkshires area of northwestern Massachusetts, also referred to as part of the “hill towns”. People ask us if we like to visit Boston, but we’re nearly as far as you can get from Boston while still remaining in Massachusetts. We are north, almost to the Vermont border, and we are west, almost to the New York state border. Needless to say, we’ve only driven in to Boston a couple of times. That makes for a very different experience than if we were in Boston or another nearby coastal town.
Instead, we are in a small, rural town in the hills. It is remote, yet it has an active, welcoming community which helps us feel right at home. This region was developed many years ago, with some of the nearby towns being established as early as the late 1600’s. Our town was incorporated in 1785. It currently has a population of around 700 people.
House sitting through TrustedHousesitters.com almost always involves taking care of one or more pets as well, since people cannot leave their pets alone while they travel. Sometimes the homeowners have other special requests. For example, on our Kentucky sit, the homeowner had a setup that required monitoring the pipes during the winter to prevent them from freezing. In our new sit in Massachusetts, there is a pet and there is also a small job that we will be responsible for. Read on…
This house sit is on a 100+ acre maple farm. The family actively taps the maple trees and produces maple syrup for sale. They have multiple channels to sell the syrup, one of which is a roadside stand. The stand relies on the honor system – we label the prices on the bottles of syrup and put out a fresh supply in the morning; then in the afternoon we stop by to pick up the cash and checks that have been deposited in the lockbox. This only requires a few minutes of our time, and the stand is open for business only on the weekends.
Since we are house sitting during the summer, we are not involved in the rest of the maple producing business. During the summer, the trees are simply doing their own thing, absorbing sunlight, growing, and stocking up on sap for the next season. The trees are tapped in the late winter, the sap is immediately processed into syrup and then bottled. All of those steps were complete by the time we arrived.
If you are interested in ordering some maple syrup, or just learning more about the farm where we stayed, check out the various links on their web site at: https://www.berkshiresweetgold.com/ We highly recommend the syrup!
Having this “job” of operating the roadside stand is really enriching our house sitting experience. Of course we are learning a lot about the actual process of maple syrup production, and that makes the history of the area come alive (for example, we learned that in earlier times, sheep production was a significant industry in the area). It also gives us the opportunity to interact and become more engaged with the community. This is an experience that we never would have had otherwise.
For anyone who might be interested in looking into this type of house sitting, the website we go through is TrustedHousesitters.com. There is an annual fee to join and to be able to see the full listings, although it does allow non-members to preview some information. The last time I checked, the fee was $119 per year. If anyone is interested, use the following link for a 25% discount: https://www.trustedhousesitters.com/refer/RAF123171/