Moving Day – Part 1

Thursday the 10th of February was the day for emotional upheaval because, not only were the movers coming to pack up the house and take all our possessions, but we were also dropping off our fur babies with Jetpets in Auckland where they would be prepared for the first leg of their journey to Sydney Australia on the Friday.

We decided to go with The Moving Company in the end, with over 35 years in the industry and services including international shipping and storage and a price point that did not make us throw up and then cry…. initially (there is more to this story that will unfold further along in our journey) they seemed like the best fit.

The movers arrived early with the driver and passenger pulling up on to our driveway in their small transit van ……Yep you read that correctly, a SMALL TRANSIT VAN!! WTF! How were those two guys (albeit strong and capable and no doubt expert packers) going to pack the entire contents of our house and workshop in one day and fit it all inside that itsy, bitsy, teeny, tiny van? My brain could not compute and was in danger of exploding and trickling out of my ears. Either they had made a mistake and thought they were moving Hobbits or we had underestimated the size of container we would need!

Cleaning out the past, packing up the present and preparing for a much better future!

So, after approaching the movers and jokingly asking if the actual container was on another truck and stuck in traffic, we found out that the packing was a two-part process. This was news to us and not communicated either verbally or in any of the documentation supplied by The Moving Company …. Strike One!

The movers would be packing everything today and then returning tomorrow with a full team and the shipping container to load it all, we had not exactly planned for this and had every intention of walking out of the house at the end of the day for the final time, the saying the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry sprung to mind.

We did not have time to dwell on how inconvenient the two-stage moving process was, we were on a deadline because we had to find, wrangle, and coral our pets into their carriers with the minimum of injury (to us of course) and load them up to get them to Jetpets.

We pointed out to the movers the things that we wanted packed and things that we did not want packed and left them to it and kept our fingers crossed that they understood, and that our passports and visas would not end up on a ship to Toronto!

The cats were very astute and knew that something was up right from the get-go! It did not help that we had to lock their cat flap incredibly early that morning to stop them disappearing into thirty-one acres of wilderness just to piss us off. They had spent best part of the morning trying to physically break the cat flap open and nearly succeeded multiple times before we put a wooden board in front of it at which point, they gave up and vanished! That would teach us!

Home is where the heart is, even if you can’t remember what box you packed it in.

Eventually we tracked them down, ever helpful they were trying to pack themselves choosing to travel to Canada in a box by ship rather than by plane in a pet carrier, I appreciated the fact that they were sleeping on all my clothes and not Martin’s!

By the time we had packed the cats into the carriers we were all a little frazzled, emotional, and running short on time but thankfully laceration free. After loading them all up, the three cats in my car and Lola with Martin in the Ute we began a long journey to Jetpets. I put on soothing music and turned up the volume hoping it would relax us all, but the perfect symphony of the cats crying and then me crying drowned the songs out.

Every single kilometre we travelled I wanted to stop the car, turn it around and drive back to the house screaming I have changed my mind.

All too quickly we arrived at Jetpets, the cats were whisked away (pardon the pun) immediately which gave us a few moments to give Lola a final cuddle before she skipped off with one of the Jetpets team wagging her tail and without a backward glance.

In reflection we were glad that this part of the process was quicker than we anticipated, there was no time for drawn out goodbyes which suited us fine because we were struggling massively with the thought of not being able to see them for an indefinite period. We worried about how scared, confused and stressed they would be, would they think we had abandoned them? How would they cope with the flight? Would they adjust in Canada? Would the cats hate us and plot new and interesting ways to end us? (We all know cats right! They can hold a grudge of epic proportions).

We could not deal with the emotions in that moment and being able to drop them off and leave made parting easier, later there would be time to let it sink in and beat ourselves up for being such shitty cat and dog parents.

If plan A does not work, the alphabet has twenty-five more letters!

With the hard part over we got back to the house to find that the movers had already made substantial progress. We busied ourselves with cleaning the house but within a brief time of starting we received a phone call from Jetpets to inform us that our cat Ray had developed a temperature.

The temperature probably caused by stress meant that the vet would not clear Ray for his flight the following evening, the problem with this was that all the pets were flying together so if Ray was not flying none of them would be flying!!! Oh crap.

If we were not stressed before this point we were now, we had not anticipated that there would be any problem getting the pets on a flight. What the hell were we going to do now? Where were we going to put all the pets at such short notice?

We need not have worried because the amazing Jetpets team had it all in hand and within a short amount of time had managed to get them all on another flight albeit on the 11th of March, they dealt with this type of thing all the time and took all the stress out of the situation. In the meantime, they arranged for the fur babies to board at an Auckland based kennel and cattery for the month. But for tonight they would monitor Ray, send off his blood work and then let us know in the morning if his temperature had gone down. Phew!

Despite this unexpected hiccup there were two unexpected positives that came out of this situation the first being that the delay would mean we would have a head start house hunting in Canada and would be a step closer to finding a place by the time the pets arrived and the second was that boarding fees in Auckland were far cheaper than in Canada, there is always a silver lining no matter how bad the circumstances.

By the end of that day, we headed off to our friend’s house exhausted and emotionally drained but with the house mostly packed and the pet relocation issue resolved, we were hopeful that would be the last spanner in the works and things would be easier from now on (hahaha I really should go into stand-up comedy).

Tomorrow we would be back to the house for packing Part Deux!