On the Road

A distinctly seasick family portrait

On the morning of October 29, we sailed into New York Harbor and docked at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal. The ship arrived in the pre-dawn hours, so we had to get up very early to watch as the ship passed under the Verrazano Bridge (the QM2 only clears it by about four metres - it's thrilling to watch). Conflicted as we were/are about our big move to the US, there is something very moving about sailing into the harbor, especially as the ship docks just across the waterway from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.

We showed Moose and Barley the Statue of Liberty, but they didn't seem to care.

All of the pet owners (short one - Atlas' owner took his dog when the kennel master wasn't looking and disembarked early) paraded through the ship together (back through the restaurant, which Moose once again anointed with his nose), and bade each other farewell in the baggage hall.

But then we got delayed. There we stood, dog and cat in tow, Matthew's immigration formalities yet to be completed, with a pile of eight bags plus carry-ons. No...make that seven bags. One of my bags (the one containing both my wedding dress quilt and my beloved childhood teddy bears) was nowhere to be found. The staff in the baggage hall assured me that the bag was somewhere around, but about twenty minutes of looking revealed nothing concrete. What my search did reveal was an identical bag from our same disembarkation group, which had plainly been left behind. So...two weeks later, some poor pensioner likely still hasn't realised that he or she has a bag stuffed with a wedding dress quilt, my two best friends (Wilbur and Kiwi), a very old and worthless Samsung laptop (my work computer, annoyingly), and probably a bunch of my underwear. Sigh.

Anyway, we finally decided that the bag was no longer in the baggage hall and tearfully proceeded to immigration, where Matthew had to wait to get formally accepted into the country. That was a fairly quick process, though it did involve tying up some poor porter's time as he watched over our remaining stuff and Barley. Matthew and I were then thrust into the bright sunlight of a gorgeous autumn day, where we waited for our ride.

Now, the whole point of travelling on the QM2 was to avoid flying the pets. Barley would be fine on a plane but Moose is a bit of a nervous mess, so we didn't want to do that to him. It would therefore make no sense at all to fly them from New York to Bozeman, so we hired a car. However, we realised while on the ship that the car company we had chosen (I'm not even going to say the name) definitely does NOT allow pets in their cars. So we had to ask our driver to park at a petrol station around the corner from the car hire place, while I picked up the car.

And when I say car, of course I mean tank. This is America, after all, and we had eight...no, seven...large bags and two pets. So we obviously had to hire the largest passenger vehicle ever made: the Ford Expedition. Yes, all 18.5 feet of her. To be driven through Newark, NJ and Chicago, IL. Sweet.

Right, so bags loaded, dog and cat smuggled in, panic setting in, we set off on our five-day road trip to the Wild West.

There are some things that really must be noted before I proceed. The first is that Barley has never spent much time in a car but certainly always protests loudly while in a crate. The second is that Moose gets terribly carsick. He is, thankfully, over the projectile vomiting stage of his chronic carsickness (his first year with us was an explosive one, if you know what I mean), but he still is visibly miserable while in the car. So moving him to Montana in a car wasn't really the obvious choice.

We had some unexpected extra space in the back of the tank, so we made Moose a little nest and let him curl up in a furry little ball of self-pity for the duration of the journey. We eventually had to let Barley out of his crate because he was driving us mad, and he eventually decided to spend all five days in Matthew's lap:

This lap comes with cup-holders. How utterly civilised. 

We spent our first night at a Best Western in the booming metropolis of DuBois (pronounced doo-boyz), Pennsylvania. Actually, the hotel was kind of awesome in that they had allowed me to ship pet food to them weeks in advance, since we were not allowed to bring it into the country. The hotel room had two double beds, which apparently made Moose and Barley feel as if they had finally arrived in the promised land. After a week of slumming it in the ship's kennels, both pets leapt gratefully onto one of the beds, curled up, and went to sleep. Plainly, these animals are used to travelling first-class, not steerage.

Moose - once again, completely contrary to expectations - won the Pet of the Day award on four* of our five road-trip days. He didn't bark (much) in the hotel rooms, he didn't demand breakfast at stupid o'clock (we spent most of the last year feeding him at 4.30 A.M. because he's a pain in the a**), and he only tried to eat one tollbooth attendant. Barley, on the other hand, lost the Pet of the Day award every single day of the trip, for making our morning routine especially difficult. That...little...furry...bastard found every little cranny in EVERY hotel room and proceeded to deposit himself inside one each morning approximately fifteen minutes before our scheduled departure. I'm telling you, we actually disassembled one hotel bed in an effort to extract him from his hiding place.

*I don't even want to tell you this but Moose lost Pet of the Day during our evening in Rapid City, South Dakota. While Matthew was searching for a lost Barley (see above), I took Moose for a walk, during which time he proceeded to spot a bunny, slip his lead, and chase said bunny down an embankment, across some railway tracks, and into a culvert pipe. Had I not otherwise been convinced of his imminent death, I might have actually killed him myself.

I wonder if I can hide in this contraption...

Oh, look at how sweet and innocent I am...So sweet. So innocent. 

After five days on the road (I had forgotten how utterly boring South Dakota is), we arrived in Bozeman, but not before picking our brand new Subaru Crosstrek up from a dealership in Billings. Because I was the only driver listed on the hire car, Matthew 'got' to drive the new car to Bozeman. His very first US driving experience consisted of driving our brand new car over a mountain pass...in the dark...in a snowstorm. Awesome!

Anyway, we are here and we promise not to subject the pets to a long trip again. Until Christmas, when we will drive to San Diego, California. Ahem.

Go West, Young Moose

Easily one of the saddest things I had to do this year was informing our beloved dog-walker, Laura, that Moose was going to be moving from the UK to Montana. Laura and her husband, Matt, became Moose's best friends and constantly bailed us out when we needed Moose to be looked after. They even hosted Moose for Christmas last year while we were in France (and I can only imagine how fun that must have been - Moose within two metres of a turkey = chaos). 

In repayment for many years of looking after the little troublemaker, I made a promise to Laura: that I would resurrect the MooseBlog and do it right. 

So here we go. 

There are two things that one does when moving internationally with a dog and a cat. First, one books a passage on the Queen Mary 2 and brings the furballs along for the ride. Then, one obviously decides to road-trip from New York to Montana with the pets in tow. Because there is nothing a cat loves more than a road-trip. 

On October 22, after a wonderful walk and goodbye pub lunch, we boarded the QM2 with our distinctly unimpressed cat and our quite freaked-out Moose. We were met at check-in by Robert, the kennel master, who led us up to the kennels. There are 12 kennels on the QM2 (though they are adding 12 more this spring), and Moose and Barley together took up four of them.

 

The kennels are way up on deck 12, which meant that while embarking and disembarking, Moose and Barley were marched through the grand entrance, through the main restaurant (I really hope they changed the tablecloths afterward because Moose got some really thorough sniffs), and up the lifts to the top deck. Any impression they may have had about life in the lap of luxury was quashed when they saw their new digs. The kennels, though clean, comfortable, and secure, were probably the least luxurious accommodation our spoilt pets have ever seen. More on this in my next blog post. 

Moose and Barley were joined by two English Bulldogs (Ralph and Roscoe), a tiny Yorkshire Terrier (Sooty), an enormous who-knows-what (Atlas), a 12 year old dog (Toby), and a genuinely terrified cat called Smokey (who promptly went on hunger strike and was -much to Cunard's credit - moved into his owners' cabin when it became clear that he was never going to eat or drink while in the kennels). I'm not going to make comment on the fellow owners except to say that most were awesome and fun to talk to and some were...not. Ahem. 

We think the QM2 kennel program is fabulous and when we move back to the UK, we will certainly be making use of it again. Robert, the kennel master, was a sweetheart who plainly loves the animals and takes care of them well. Any messes (the dogs have a small exercise area on the deck) were cleaned up promptly, and the dogs really responded to Robert's friendly and playful demeanour. 

We made the decision NOT to visit Moose and Barley as often as we were allowed (8-10, 11-12, 3-6, 8-8.30), as we realised that Moose became frantic with excitement whenever we were around but settled down and played with Robert and the other dogs when we were not), so we only visited first thing in the morning and then for an hour before dinner. We thought that worked well. 

Barley coped well on the ship. All of the animals were a bit skittish for the first 24 hours but Barley especially settled into the rhythm of life on the ship and didn't seem to mind. We let him wander around the indoor exercise area, where soon enough he found a high shelf to sit on and watch smugly as the dogs played below.

Moose - pay attention to this, as this will surprise you - behaved beautifully. He got along with the other dogs. He didn't try to bite anyone (even the many passengers who came up to view the dogs). He didn't make a fool of himself or us upon embarkation or disembarkation. In short, he behaved himself. And has ever since. We gave Robert a Moose and were given back a reformed Moose. Man, we might have to do this QM2 thing more often. 

We did have one tremendously silly day at sea. Cunard likes to get all of the animal owners and their pets together for a photo shoot during the voyage. The idea is to get a shot of the owners with their pets, with the stack and Queen Mary 2 sign in the background. Well, apparently they schedule these shoots well in advance, and ours happened to fall on the roughest day we had at sea. We're talking about a day of 20-foot swells and gusts of up to 110 mph. In other words, a perfect day to go up to the top deck and smile for the camera. It was too windy to take photos outside, so we did it in the fluorescent-lit kennels instead. When our stuff finally gets to Bozeman, I will scan a copy of the photo they got of us...we're looking distinctly green. 

Matthew spent the rest of the day in bed while I went to the pub (obviously) and enjoyed fish and chips, a couple of pints, and watching the waves inundate the windows. The animals, oddly, didn't seem bothered by the weather at all, even though deck 12 was swaying like an undergrad at a frat party.

All in all, it was a wonderful voyage. We would do it again with the pets, for sure (though I wouldn't recommend taking pets just for fun - it was much better than flying but no one is going to pretend that a week on a ship isn't stressful for animals). 

You can't really see it, but the Statue of Liberty is just above Moose's head

For the record, we had fun on the ship as well. Matthew and I were seated next to two very entertaining couples at dinner (Jacky and Malcolm - a British couple who were doing the round-trip, Southampton-NYC-Southampton - were especially awesome company and kept us laughing every evening). Matthew and I also became known from day one as 'the crazy couple' because we enjoyed hanging out in the outdoor hot tub in high winds. We also became regulars at the nightly pub quiz and all of the lectures (of which there many). I'm not sure that we are new converts to cruise holidays, but we are definitely big fans of the transatlantic voyage as a means of transport. 

I'll wrap this one up here and then write another post about the road-trip shenanigans and our arrival in Bozeman. It definitely deserves its own post.