En Route

It was a long process to get from Baton Rouge, LA to Yeosu, South Korea, hence the long post that follows.  It’s a long route any way you slice it, but taking the animals made it abnormally long.  Oh, did I mention that?  Yeah, we’re crazy, so we decided to take our dog, Sadie, and one cat, Mojito.  We (wisely, for one at least) decided to leave the inside/outside cat in BR with my parents.  (Hi, Dora!  We miss you!  Ok, well, I miss you.  Blake…  He’s, uh, really busy…)  But we insanely decided it would be a good idea to truck our 80lb bloodhound and 14lb cat across the world to Korea.  And, no, I don’t know what kind of cat Mo is – yellow?  House?  Fat?  You wouldn’t believe how many people asked us that!

So as I was explaining, it made our trip a little more complicated to take them.  Because, you see, only one airline (that I could find) in the entire world will fly an 80lb dog from the US to Korea as baggage.  Fly her as freight, you say?  Sure, if you’ve got about $2500 lying around that you don’t need, that’s a great idea!  In fact, if you do, please feel free to email me, and we’ll just set up her return trip for our flight home at the end of this.  Unfortunately, though, we don’t, so Sadie got to fly as baggage.  And in all honesty, the relocation company we spoke to advised it because customs is much simpler to bring an animal in with you than to ship one over as freight.  So United Airlines was our only option.

And of course, the puddle jumpers that fly out of the lovely Baton Rouge airport aren’t big enough to carry the kennel of an 80lb dog, so we began our journey Sunday morning, October 24, with a drive to Houston, which was really a good thing because we got to see Kelley (Blake’s sister), her husband Josh, and our niece Riley one last time.  We spent a nice evening in Houston, ate what was probably our last steak for a long time, and flew out bright and early to San Francisco very early Monday, October 25.

We had decided not to make the two flights to Korea back to back.  Again, having the animals with us made things a little more difficult.  If we had simply sat in the San Francisco airport waiting for our next flight, we couldn’t get the animals back during the layover.  And they would have been in their kennels for close to 30 hours, which was just way too long.  I really didn’t want to do that to them, and I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled cat pee before, but riding in a car for 6 hours with a urine soaked cat kennel just did not sound like fun to me.  So we stopped for the night in San Francisco.  And like Houston, it worked well because we got to see Ryan, Blake’s brother, one last time.  We missed not seeing his wife, Anna Colleen, but we’ll catch her next time for sure.

We arrived in San Francisco around 10am their time, and that’s where the fun really began.  In Houston we got to drop the animals off at a building just outside the airport for Continental’s Pet Safe program, with the help of Blake’s parents (who so graciously drove to Houston with us to help us off and bring our car back home).  But when we got to SF, we had to figure out how to juggle 4 suitcases (LARGE suitcases – in fact, I’m pretty sure they’re technically over most airlines’ size limits, but they didn’t notice and I’m not telling), 2 carry-on bags, 2 book bags, an extra-large dog kennel, and a cat kennel.  I meant to take a picture of all the craziness, but just know that we got A LOT of strange looks – I mean, seriously, I felt like we were in Korea already.  Are we really the only people who have ever flown our pets anywhere?  That’s awfully nice of the airlines to make up these special pet programs just for us.

 But somehow we got both the animals, found all of our luggage (one flight later), managed to get all of that stuff and ourselves on the hotel shuttle, and, 3 hours later, made it to our hotel.  No exaggeration, it was 1pm by the time we got there.  But the hotel was nice, and we finally got the animals settled.  Sadie was NOT a happy camper about the plane ride.  She was fine, but she was not going to forgive us that easily.  Thankfully, the animal-friendly hotel (thanks, Crown Plaza San Francisco Airport) gave us dog treats and a stuffed toy for her, which of course she loved (and which of course we accidently left in San Fran).  And there was a park literally right next to the hotel that even had a dog park, so we went for a nice walk after lunch.  It was beautiful there, but the dog park was a little odd.  It was like a 1/4” deep layer of cat litter or something – no grass.  I’m used to nice, lush, grassy dog parks at home.  Oh well, Sadie enjoyed running around anyway.

This is what Sadie did in San Francisco...

...and this is what Mo did.

 

Then that night Ryan gave us a CliffsNotes tour of the city, and we had a really good time.  It’s a neat area, and I’m excited to go back and see him and Anna Colleen for a real visit after we get home.  Here are some of the things we saw while we were there…

the Bay Bridge

Alcatraz

the windiest rule in the world (or something like that)

the sea lions at Pier 39

the carousel at Pier 39

and the shops and restaurants

Mom, check out the crab!

 



And, drum roll please… dun tada dah dun tada…             The Golden Gate Bridge!

…yeah, that’s what I thought, too…  But I’m sure it’s as cool as ever in daylight, and we’ll be sure to see it then when we come back.  And we really did have a good time.

Tuesday morning, October 26, the adventure continued; and we (somehow) managed to make it back to the airport with all our stuff and the animals (sans Sadie’s new favorite toy).  It took a ridiculous amount of time to check in, including the airline rejecting the fasteners on the kennels and our replacing them with the nuts and bolts we had brought just in case (though not enough, of course), Sadie getting one more opportunity (and refusing, of course) to use the bathroom in the dog area at the airport before the 12+ hour flight, and the woman at the check-in desk trying to give at least one of us a heart attack by (incorrectly) informing us that we would need some sort of papers (which we didn’t have… of course) to board a plane to Korea with a one-way ticket.

Then I had my first mini-meltdown in the international terminal of SFO.  Because for my last meal in the States, all I really wanted was some McDonald’s breakfast.  One last breakfast burrito and hash browns, or maybe a sausage biscuit, because even though they have McDonald’s in Korea, the meat just isn’t quite the same over here.  But of course, because that’s how our day was going, once we got through the security checkpoint, all the food available (and keep in mind, this is for breakfast) was either Japanese (you’re kidding me, right?), Mexican, or some little deli with sandwiches.  Poor Katie Ebey got to listen to my rant about how just because it’s the international terminal doesn’t mean that needs to be the only choice of cuisine.  But I finally calmed down and ate my quesadilla, and honestly, the salsa was pretty good.  It really did taste like the salsa in Mexico, which I LOVE.  Not really what I had in mind at 9:30 in the morning, but it beat the heck out of pretty much everything I’ve had since we got over here (except Tiffany’s homemade vegetable soup… AWESOME!).

Eventually we boarded the plane, and I have to say I was really nervous.  I was so worried about the animals, and we were afraid that we’d gotten spoiled by our flights on Korean Air on our original trip to Korea and would be disappointed by United.  But I have to say, I was really impressed.  Just after we boarded the plane, before we even had a chance to get settled and ask someone to check that the animals had made it safely on the plane as well, a stewardess brought us a little ticket for each of them, verifying that they’d been boarded.  And the seats lay completely flat, which was wonderful!  The service wasn’t as good as Korean Air (although Evelyn was great), but they had snacks and sandwiches out for us to get to the whole flight and a decent selection of movies, games, and TV shows. 

The flight was relatively uneventful, though I didn’t sleep the whole time because it was daytime to us.  So I arrived in Seoul pretty tired but so excited to see the animals!  They were both fine and, somehow, not drenched in pee.  They both did very well and got through customs without any problems.  Sadie let us know her disapproval of the long kennel time with some new tricks she’d learned from my parents’ Irish setter (thanks, Rowan – she can now whine and sigh like a true spoiled rotten Adams dog), but fortunately we found some grass outside the airport and let her walk for a little bit.  Mo apparently didn’t mind the 17 some odd hours in the kennel and opted to wait till Yeosu to go to the bathroom, even though we actually poured litter on the ground for him.

Then the next and final leg of our trip began – the 6-hour drive to Yeosu from Seoul.  We had found a relocation company that could provide us a driver (albeit not an English-speaking one) and a van that could hold all of our stuff and the animals.  It took him a couple tries, but he managed to squeeze it all in.

Then we had to call a contact at the relocation company and get her to translate to the driver that we were starving and wanted him to stop somewhere to eat.  Stupid, spoiled American that I am, I decided not to go back into the airport where I KNEW there was a McDonald’s and instead let the driver hit one on the way out of town.  Ha!  Let me just give you a word of advice – if you want to go to McDonald’s, and you see one – just go!  Don’t stop, don’t wait, don’t pause, and definitely don’t expect there to be another one later – just go!

So anyway, we got to experience the wonderful world of Korean rest stops instead.  How do I describe a Korean rest stop?   If I hadn’t been awake for over 20 hours, I might have had the presence of mind to take a picture to show you.  And I’d tell you I’ll just take one if I ever have the opportunity to visit one again, but I really, really hope that I don’t.  Ever.  Again.  Next to the gas station was a decent sized building, long and skinny, with some food places outside that had what looked like a Korean adaptation of carnival food – various fried foods and items on sticks (do NOT get the French fries – I know they look like the potato sticks from a can that we had when we were kids, but they’re not – trust me).  The majority of the inside was an open area with lots of seating and a couple of small, manned kiosks with pictured menus (thankfully and not thankfully) where you ordered from one of several “restaurants.”  You then went to the particular restaurant from which you’d ordered and picked up your “food” (Note:  I’m using these terms very loosely).  It looked similar to a food court in a mall, except you ordered from all of the restaurants in the same place.  And you’ve never heard of these places before.

I took one look at the menu and headed straight for the little food shop that occupied one end of the building.  And that was where I had my first real meltdown.  Exhausted, starving, a little scared, and even more overwhelmed from my much too fresh, across-the-globe move, I walked around the few shelves of the little store, quickly realized that I wasn't going to find anything I recognized except Coca Cola, and started crying right there in somebody’s Korean version of a gas station convenience store.

It got better after that.  I ate as much as I could manage of something called a “shrimp burger” (Blake didn’t bother) and told myself that we’d just cook a lot.  An awful lot.  And the driver made friends with Sadie right away; he even let her ride on the floor of the van by me instead of staying in her kennel.  She and I slept most of the way there, and Mo didn’t make a peep.  Poor Blake struggled to get comfortable in the front seat and slept very intermittently.  But we finally arrived, exhausted, after 11pm Wednesday night in Yeosu, which to us was like 9am Wed morning (almost 24 hours after leaving San Francisco the morning before).  I don’t care what anyone says, that night, that bed was one of the most comfortable places I’ve ever slept!

In total, for travel time alone, it took us about (5+4.25+12.25+6) 27-1/2 hours, over 14 time zones, to get to our new home.  And it was a long, hard trip, but now that we’re all here, safe and settling in, I don’t regret bringing the animals at all.  And, no, Josh, not one person has chased Sadie with chopsticks…yet.