Alaska and the cats

Things are progressing well for our imminent Alaska move with the only outstanding hurdle being the cats.

Amanda and I have decided to ship the cats since wrangling baby and cats through 3 airports would be a distinct lack of fun. Stupidly we bought two hard cages during our last trip to the USA without reading the shipping regulations, these kennels are way to small, note if a cat flies as hand luggage it appears there are no issues with how small the cage you use for them is so long as it fits under the seat in front of you. 

On realising our mistake I went about trying to source a kennel which would meet the requirements.  We ended up with this one which Ron is kindly modelling.

Lack of ventilation

Even though this has a meets IATA  standards on the label I am 99% sure it fails one of the first criteria.  Kennels must have ventilation on all four sides.  On realising our second mistake, trusting labels on a product you buy from Home Sentry. I set off to get hopefully kennels which meet all the requirements I found them at a store called Agrocampo, kennels were half the price of the one I bought from Home Sentry which was an added bonus.  From the kennel side all that is left is to try and get our money back from Home Sentry rather than store credit. :(

And here are the cats trying out their transport prisons.

Ahhh cat prison, least the doors are still open.

So apart from the cages what is difficult about shipping the cats, well we had a plan which all fell through once people in Alaska finally decided what they were doing. 

The plan was to send the cats slightly ahead of us and kennel them in Alaska until we arrived.  The problem was we had forgotten that it was Thanks giving the Thursday before we fly  (so it seemed had the first kennel we talked to in Anchorage) so all the kennels are fully booked.  The second issue is that the cats can't leave the day that we do incase there is no space for them and they end up having to go on the next flight.  

The solution is having people here who are willing to help us combat this problem.  Current plan is that Ron and Susan will stay in Bogota at Animalunos until around the 12th December when our fantastic nanny Lucia will then take them to the airport for their three flight trip to meet us in Anchorage. We are currently still booking all of this so things may change as we move along, other bridges we have yet to cross is getting all of the certification sorted out but that we will leave until next week.