One of the conditions of your stay at a house sit is leave the house the way you found it, plus take care of washing up your towels and bedding, etc.  So clean. Put things away.

The final stages – do the laundry, (bedding and towels) can’t be done until the morning we leave, but we can do the tidying up, vacuum, run the dishwasher, try to fit everything into the car.  I swear there must be more than 7 packages we had delivered!  (In the photo you see all the stuff to the left of the Christmas tree?  That was all ours!)  Packing the car was definitely tetris. 

Since we were crossing the border, we had to have all our receipts bundled, totalled and categorized.  Grocery items have no tax, so don't need to be included in your total.  We have $800 (Canadian) personal exemption per person.  Officers working at the border coming back to Canada like to ask what kind of things you purchased, so I always make sure to have my totals by category - art supplies, housewares and dishes, sports equipment, thrift store items.  We did get a further query on what the sports equipment consisted of.  We think they are making sure we weren't bringing in guns.  And they always ask about booze and tobacco.

 We also made sure we filled up with gas before crossing back into Ontario!  $3.19 per gallon, US.  So, with the terrible exchange rate right now, it is $4.63 Cdn per gallon.  There are 3.785 litres in a US gallon, which means we are at $1.22 per litre. BARGAIN!!! The price of gas at home was around $1.50 per litre, so we were ahead. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure we wasted all of our savings on tolls for the 407 (The amount on my credit card was $111)...  welcome back to Canada.

Our last step - we left a couple of hand written notes for the pet parents, included a thank you for having us, and left a small Welcome Home gift.  (Yes, we were very much motivated by wanting that golden referral!)