Precious cargo.

Our four cats, whose whole world was the living room and kitchen in our old house, got to experience life at a whole new level - - - 33,000 feet up! Sure puts that trip to the vet in our car into a new perspective. They each had their own carrier specially marked with "Live Animal" (we wanted to keep it that way), our cell phone number, last name and each of their names. I figured that if I was a baggage handler at the airport carrying these cats into the cargo hold, I'd care more about them if I knew their names. I think that must be true. There was great care taken in Albuquerque to further secure the cages and to get the destination labels in place. They were hand inspected by a very caring TSA agent who seemed to understand our concern for having the cages open at the airport. Security being what it is these days, we complied without complaint. After that, we put them onto the conveyor belt, watched them go through and hoped that we would see them alive and well in Richmond.

We saw them loaded onto the plane in Albuquerque, just before we were called to board ourselves. We were fine until we got to DFW, where then we had at least 3 gate changes, or was it 4? We were almost an hour late in taking off because, as the captain explained to us as we were 8th in line to take off, the baggage handlers had to play catch up in finding where flight 1180 to Richmond was in fact taking off from....gate what??? We were so worried and just had to have faith that the destination tags, so carefully placed in Albuquerque, were doing the job in getting them to the right place. It was a long 3 hours up in the air, wondering if they were with us below.

They were! At the baggage claim in Richmond, we attracted quite a few lookers as another TSA agent, with all 4 on a baggage cart, was calling out to whoever owned these cats. He didn't need an I.D., and I marvelled at this until I realized, "who in their right minds would claim these were their cats, if they weren't?" They were all fine, Ringo and Zip were out and looking around, curious at all the people looking at them. Zap was behind his pillow, not very happy at the situation. Little Katrina was buried so deep under her pillow and towel, all I could see of her was the tip of her tail. She was taking this very hard.

All is well with them now. Until the next move that is. We are glad that part of the trip is over. Travelling with that many cats is not fun. Here are some photos.