After listing their Evansville home and selling most of their possessions in order to begin living abroad in October 2024, Darrell and Penelope Pennington visited 44 cities in 14 countries across Europe before returning home for a visit in December 2025. They embarked on Year Two of their global adventure in January, a trek that started in Mexico and now has taken them into South America. Penelope — who quips she’s “a broad abroad” — shares missives from the road. Read the inaugural column.
Living in someone else’s house for two months is weird.
That’s not a sentence I ever imagined writing. But as I sit here in Neuquén, Argentina, wrapping up a 60-day pet sit, I am reflecting on the fun I have had with my new buddies, Pirata and Durazno, and realizing how much I am going to miss them.
Pet sitting has been a significant part of these travel adventures for the past 20 months. Darrell and I have discussed what the pet side of the equation is in previous columns. But we’ve never really addressed the non-pet side of the responsibility, or what it is like living in another person’s home for an extended time, in a neighborhood where none of the neighbors speaks English and we speak essentially no Spanish.
Our most recent stay in Neuquén was our 10th pet sit and, at full two months, also our longest. It is a perfect encapsulation of all of the obligations and activities that can be part of pet/house sitting, as well as being a fitting symbol of that aspect of the life we have chosen for this stage.
This particular sitting experience required us to address the following: appliances failing days after our arrival, animals tearing up watering systems that then need to be fixed, a contractor needing to begin a home addition, a local yoga group using an on-site studio for monthly activity sessions, water leaking under the floor of a sunroom, dogs stealing and eating multiple chickens from a neighbor, and suffering electric outages on multiple occasions. We confronted all of this with the home- and pet owner away in Thailand, a 12-hour difference from local time. Their parents live 45 minutes away from here and speak no English.
Sleeping in another person’s bed, bathing in their shower, using their dishes to plate meals, and tending to plants, landscaping, small repairs, and chicken thefts were not given much, if any, thought prior to our first sit in Sayalonga, Spain.
We have two more sits in Peru and Ecuador scheduled this year. We plan to travel to Asia next year, and we have not seen many pet sitting opportunities there on the website we use to find opportunities. This part of our travel experience may soon be coming to a close, and it has been such an interesting and unusual way to both manage our travel expenses and provide much-needed time and fun with fur babies all over the globe. Just another experience that will provide many memories over the next decades, all thanks to this crazy decision!
Join me online as we continue this journey, and feel free to say hi!
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