We made it!

I’m not gonna lie, yesterday was a long and stressful day! It’s really hard to wrangle two dogs and 10 bags between two people. That math just doesn’t work. Thankfully we ran into helpful people every step of the way. It was a long day but we’re all here and all of our stuff is here too. I fell asleep last night to our old girl snoring in my ear and my little guy snuggled up next to me. So much planning has gone into this move it’s hard to believe we live here now. We’re not leaving in a week like we normally do. Instead, we picked up the keys to our house this morning and bought some furniture I lined up ahead of time. With any luck we’ll be mostly setup by the end of the week.

Yesterday was just a blur. There are a few things that would have made things smoother with the dogs if we’d known them ahead of time. I’ll write a detailed post on traveling to Bonaire with pets once we’re settled for anyone else looking to do it. I had a really hard time finding any first-hand experiences of it and that’s what the blog is for, sharing info!

We divided yesterday into hurdles to pass and decided not to talk about the next step till the hurdle at hand had been passed:

1. Drive to the airport & check our giant bags. Of everything we did yesterday, this step went the worst. Yeah, that surprised me too. We had planned to do curbside check-in – but you can’t with animals. So I went inside to check them, another bust. They needed the dog’s immigration forms which I didn’t expect to need till we got here. After many trips back and forth to the car, getting yelled at by the people policing the drop-off, we finally passed the first hurdle – dogs approved & bags checked, thankfully all within weight limits!
2. Gas up the rental car, walk the dogs somewhere, chill for a few after the stress of #1.
3. Return the rental car and head to the gate.
4. Board the plane and hope the dogs do well! They did 🙂 the flight attendants were so nice!
5. Get through Bonaire immigration with the dogs. The official Bonaire pet form doesn’t have a place for the dogs name which caused a snag. “How do we know which is which, they’re both yellow.” Fair enough. After two officials reviewed the forms, I was cleared to leave! Whatever else happens I can deal with, I have my dogs!
6. I grabbed a cab and settled the dogs at the apartment while J waited for bags and got the rental truck. Not an easy task for either of us but it’s done now!
7. I went grocery shopping (I didn’t want to!). We split a bottle of wine, cooked dinner and went to bed early. My plan was broccoli pasta with chickpeas …. I need to learn some Dutch, these were not chickpeas but good enough after a long day with no food.

Overall though, my biggest worry was getting the dogs here and they did so well! We gave them their “firework/thunder” drugs and some anti-nausea pills. They’ve never gotten motion sickness before and we’ve taken them on some very long road trips but just in case. The flight attendants were amazing! They loved them and made us feel very welcome which was a huge help. They were so good on the plane that we were even able to watch a movie. Proud of them!

That’s enough for yesterday! I’ll tell you about day 1 tomorrow.

Goodnight!