 |
| A distinctly seasick family portrait |
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. |
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment