Moving to the states

The flight out….

Well I woke up at 3am this morning and I didn’t really try to get back to sleep as the alarm clock was set for 4.15 this morning to get ready for the drive to the airport. It was a quick check of email to make sure we hadn’t had any important emails come in and then it was time to shut the computer network down, pack it in the hand luggage and let the cats out for their last roam around the house. They all seemed to be very suspicious that I was letting them out of their room AND they were hungry as we were not allowed to feed them last night so needless to say they were making their feelings heard.
(seeing as though this post is pretty long, the rest of it is in the more section)

All Gone……

Well about the only thing left in the house is the furniture AND the broadband connection 🙂
The pickfords movers came at 9.10 this morning (slightly early) and got stuck in pretty quickly. We had 43 boxes (i think we had allowed for 44) and they had finished by 12.10pm. The box-to-tea ratio was not bad at 22:1. They could have had more but the packed ALL the mugs so I’ve not even got a mug to drink coffee from between now and Wednesday morning. That will have to be rectified if I am going to be awake to get to the airport.
I gave away all my motorbike stuff on the freecycle mailing list. One guy was extremely thankful and took everything I had (apart from the helmet and gloves which had gone mouldy). Then this afternoon a mechanic came round to collect the motorbike. After a couple of minutes fiddling with the choke and a boost from a special battery pack he had the bike running. He wasn’t able to drive it away because as soon as the booster pack was disconnected the bike died, but I was very impressed that it started up. He had to bash the brakes with a brick (which promptly split in two) to release them as they had siezed up a bit and after pumping up the tires (with an electric pump) he wheeled the bike down the lane. I was very sad to see it go as I had many a happy mile on it and seeing him getting it started to easily I wish I had flogged it for more money.

The freecycle network was quite neat as last night I deleted all the content on Boring Bulb Blog and recreated articles on all the things I had to give away. Then sent an email out to the list and people could comment if they wanted the things. That way everyone knew what was left. As I received comments I moved the category from Free to Gone and the url that I gave out only contained the Free items. It worked out really well – thanks MT

We had a celebratory meal out at The Plough at lunchtime which was nice. Kristen had a duck wrap and I had a steak and onion baguette. Mine wasn’t as nice as I remembered from the Friday lunchtimes at Siemens – partly because it didn’t have gravy on it and partly because a lot of the steak had fat/gristle in it. The bits that didn’t were nice though. Kristen wanted to go to this pub as we had often driven past it but never stopped so now was a good time.

Animal Airlines respond

After my post about Animal Airlines being a bunch of cowboys I get the following amusing email from them. Spelling mistakes left untouched 🙂

DEAR MR/MRS. HELSBY – YOU REALLY ARE DEARS,
WELCOME AND CONGRATULATIONS – FOR JOINING OUR ‘COMPLAINTS CLUB’ – I AM SURE YOU WILL BE PLEASED TO KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE VERY FIRST MEMBERS IN OVER 40 YEARS. HOWEVER, DON’T GET TOO EXCITED BECAUSE,SADLEY, YOU WILL BE DISSAPOINTED TO HEAR THAT WE SIMPLY CAN’T FIND ANY OTHERS WILLING TO JOIN YOU BOTH. BUT HOLD-ON IN THERE, LETS SEE WHAT THE NEXT 40 YEARS BRINGS – YOU NEVER KNOW!
AS YOU ARE BOTH THE VERY ‘FIRST’ MEMBERS TO THE CLUB WE HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE YOU ‘HONARY LIFE MEMBERS’ AND I HOPE YOU WILL BOTH ACCEPT THIS INVITATION IN THE SPIRIT IT IS INTENDED.
BON VOYAGE,
TONY

Avoid Animal Airlines!

Animal Airlines really seem to be a cowboy company and are really unorganised and I really recommend avoiding them.
I’d be intrigued to see if anyone has had any success with importing their cats to the states with them. We fly out on the 20th April (hooray!) and are having major hassles getting straight answers out of “animal airlines” who are meant to be the people to send the cats with.
We are flying continental from Manchester to Columbus Ohio and have been quoted £1500 for the three cats by continental who say we need to go via animal airlines. However animal airlines gave us a quote for £735 but when we tried to book it they then bumped the price up by £135 by saying we needed to have the cats sent to cincinatti (and we would have to pick them up from there – a 3 hours drive from Columbus). When we reluctantly decided to try that route, the price went up ANOTHER 3% as we wanted to pay by credit card – NOW they are saying that they could decide to use Continental and we might have to pay that – but they’d decide on the day – oh and we’d have to throw the cats out of the airplane window as they can’t be dropped off at the airport until an hour *after* our flight has left. The fact that a quote (which is meant to be legally binding) has increased in value by £135 is just not right and I wonder if trading standards would have something to say…….
This company seem to make the rules up as they go along and I just don’t trust them – but £1500 is VERY expensive for three cats and I’m not sure we can afford that with everything else we have to pay out in the first weeks of moving.
The whole experience is really frustrating. Kristen managed to speak to another company this afternoon who said that they had had a lot of people coming to them after getting the runaround from Animal Airlines and who had not been very happy with their service.
(Hopefully this rant will get a high rating in google as I couldn’t find much on them in google (which is a bad sign by itself))

Exporting the cats to america

4 phone calls, 3 departments and a very hard to understand voicemessage I have found the Importation of Pets and Other Animals into the United States page (this page also has information on birds, dogs,monkeys and turtles) which states “Pet cats are subject to inspection at ports of entry for evidence of infectious diseases that can be transmitted to humans (zoonotics). If a cat appears to be ill, further examination by a licensed veterinarian might be required. There is no rabies vaccination requirement for cats. Following entry into the United States, all cats are subject to state and local vaccination requirements. Looks like we don’t need any further documentation as far as the states are concerned. The airline needs some paperwork too though…..
That zoonotics makes a nice word-of-the-day.

House updates – a viewer turned up!

Well the move is a step closer tonight due to the fact that the viewer scheduled for tonight actually showed up! The one that was meant to have come this morning had the decency to let us know that they had to postphone the meeting but the two before that just never showed up 🙁 We’re going to give the estate agent Kristen’s mobile number so they can at least ring us to say if they are going to be delayed or need to cancel.

House for sale in Congleton.

Three bedroom semi-detached property in Congleton, Cheshire, UK benefiting from gas central heating, good sized gardens, off-road parking and garage. The Rightmove website has all the details or you can see the Timothy Brown estate agents site too. I had posted one of these urls a while back but I missed out a quote so the link never actually appeared on the page even though it was in the code so here it is again.