Lexi, Claudia & Saffie

On the road again for a short house sit of 5 days in High Wycombe, which is about 40 mins from London, to look after Lexi – a 4 year old Cockapoo and two beautiful cats – Claudia and Saffie.

When house sitting we always plan to arrive the day prior to the owners leaving to provide ample time to meet our new ‘family’ and familiarize ourselves with their routine as well as the house. Unfortunately, the best laid plans do not always come to fruition.

Firstly, our afternoon flight from Edinburgh to London Stansted airport was delayed by an hour and then our luggage was extremely slow to arrive on the carousel. This meant we missed the bus we were booked to catch by a mere 5-10 minutes and the next bus wasn’t for another two and a half hours. To add insult to injury there had also been an incident on the motorway so the later bus left half an hour late as well. Instead of arriving at our destination at 7:30pm, it ended up being 10:15pm.  Better late than never – we were met at the bus station by  Carolyn and David and Lexi.

The impact of the reduced handover time was mitigated to a large degree as Carolyn is a super organised woman and had documented and sent us lots of information about Lexi, Claudia & Saffie as well as the house and local attractions. We were able to do the handover quickly and allow them to get to bed as they had to be up early the next morning for their flight.

Lexi is normally with Carolyn & David 24/7 as they take her to work with them, so on the first morning after they left and she was greeted by us…..well, she was a little surprised. She ran off to her ‘bed’ and I’m sure she was thinking “who the heck are you?”.

It took a lot of petting and bribing her with her favourite treat to get her off the bed, but by mid-morning we were certainly friends and it only got better each day. By day 5 we were inseparable (I like to think) and I wanted to  stow her in my suitcase for our next assignment in France.

One of the requirements with Lexi was that she had to sleep in the same room with us. Her bed was placed in our room where she slept till around 6 or 7 am when she would join us on the bed. Around this time Claudia would also arrive and join the three of us.

Lexi didn’t like doing her ‘business’ in the back yard so we would take her for a short walk first thing in the morning, and before bedtime, to her favourite spot in the street. Lexi also needed to have medication every morning, but since it was hiding inside a cheese treat, she eagerly ate it.

We also had two beautiful cats to care for. Claudia was a very chatty cat and loved regular cuddles, but Saffie would spend most of her time outside and generally only came inside for food or when it was raining. The house had a cat flap so the cats would come and go as they pleased and even Lexi used the cat flap occasionally!

During the day, Lexi would spend time with a local dog walker or friends so we generally had the day to ourselves to explore the local area or just relax in the garden and enjoy the warm, sunny weather. Yes, I did say sunny weather – it isn’t always cold and wet in England.

During our short stay here we visited Henley on Thames where we went on a pleasant boat ride along the River Thames. We discovered whilst visiting this lovely town that this is where you will find the grave of the 60’s singer Dusty Springfield. We took advantage of the warm weather and went on walks through the Chiltern Hills and along the Thames, visited Marlow, the Hell Fire Caves and caught the bus to Oxford and participated in a walking tour of this University town.

All too quickly Lexi’s mum and dad returned but they kindly allowed us to stay for two additional nights, and this gave us the opportunity to spend more time with them all before flying to France for our next sit.

Take a look here to see the nice reference they wrote for us.

And here is a message we received from Lexi after we left….