Flying with Pets

One word,… SUCKS!
Ok, here’s a couple more words,…
UNPREDICTABLE
EXPENSIVE
EXASPERATING

What were we thinking to have pets! HA! And we're going to have to to include the two cats on the next trip!???!!!
It cost $175 to fly Bo, (our dog)! Damn, we could have bought him a ticket for the seat beside us for that! We had originally been told $100 per animal, but we figured out that must have been a different airline.
Then, the carrier we bought for Grace, (our parrot), was too big. I’d been given standard pet carry-on dimensions, and bought a hard sided carrier (with a perch in it) to fit. Well, apparently those dimensions work for every plane, on every airline, in the whole wide world, EXCEPT the Boeing 575. And – you guessed it – that is the plane we were on. So we had to buy a soft sided carrier from Delta there at the ticket counter. Those Delta people are smart, they KNOW they’ve got ya by the short hairs at that point, so they charge $75 dollars for the exact same carrier they sell at Petco and Petsmart for $35. Aaarrrggg!!!!

OK, so we left Seattle at 1:30 on January 11th, 2010. (Flight left 20 minutes late.) Arrived in Atlanta at 9:30 pm (late). Missed connection to Jacksonville which was to leave at 9:35. Lucky enough to catch another flight to Jacksonville that was to leave an hour later. It left late, was delayed by 30 minutes, so left Atlanta at 11:15pm, arrived in Jacksonville at 12: 45, where a van picked us up and drove us to Brunswick.

Arrived in Brunswick at 2:30 am on January 12th, 2010. We stayed at Best Western at off I95. Picked up a rental car (mini van) from Enterprise at 10:00am, arrived at the Marina by 10:30am.

I saw Quest for the first time. It was very exciting. She’s been sitting at the marina, unattended since we bought her 3 months ago. Her deck is covered with bird poop. But other than that, she looks wonderful. While we were hauling our stuff onto the boat, a bottle nose dolphin swam right up to the dock! He swam one direction, then swam back the other direction, so close I could have reached out and touched him. He was checking us out, I know he was. It was SO FRICKIN COOL!!

Quest is beautiful, and she seems so big! Far larger than tiny ‘Evolution’ that I had in Portland. And quite a bit larger than ‘Lazy Lee’ that Sid and I use in Anacortes. We spent most of the day today putting away our stuff, (most of it), and there was room for everything, and it’s not a cluttered, chaotic mess! I LOVE this boat!

January 13, 2010
Up and around early this morning. Clear skys, sunny, but cold. 41 degrees now with a hi today of 54.