Well the week of transition is drawing to a close. After the hullaballo of getting out of the house and down to VA, we finally got Buddy to the pet travel company (can’t recommend Pender Air highly enough!) while we ran our last few errands and headed to the airport ourselves. For some reason, our TSA Precheck didn’t come through as it usually does with Global Entry so I had to take off my shoes for the first time in forever – oh the shock! But we had plenty of time and ended up in the Lufthansa lounge celebrating with double G&Ts and real food (Frank says chicken schnitzel was pretty good!). Then to our upgraded first class seats for the short hop to JFK. We got to the gate and they were volunteering to check bags to your final desitination for free. Yay! I would have happily checked all the bags but Delta does draw the line at how many bags you can check before charging you. Apparently the combination of first class upgrade and the Delta AmEx card puts that limit at 3. So I gladly took that tag and left the bag on the end of the jet bridge. What happened to it after that became quite the mystery.

The domestic leg was uneventful and we had lots of time to change terminals and get to our flight to EDI. I spent some time chatting with the lovely retired gentleman from Boise across the aisle from me who was going to visit his daughter who married a Scot and was living in Falkirk. Then after a passable meal and better-than-mediocre wine, I actually managed to get 3 full hours of sleep! (Frank says I was actually snoring but who would believe that!) The immigration folks didn’t seem interested in my work visa (!) so we wandered to the baggage claim where our 6 bags checked in Dulles were in the first bunch off the plane. What was missing? The gate checked bad. The Delta app indicated that it was still in JFK and would be on a flight to Amsterdam first thing in the morning. ARRRRGGGGHGHHH

So I went to the lost baggage office – a very small window in the baggage area – to find not a soul in site. Instead there was a sign that says most airlines lost baggage were being handled by Swissport and please scan this QR code to file your log bag report. Which I did. And the app told me that I had to call Delta. Which I did. And the person on the other end of the phone told me to report it to the office. Which I could not. When I tried to explain that, she hung up on me! Rude! While I had gotten about 3 hours of sleep, I was still not my perky lovable self so you can imagine how this went over. Meanwhile, Frank was arguing with Avis (whom we always get good service from!) about the “upgrade” they were giving us that we didn’t want – mostly because we weren’t convinced that VW Golf would take all the cases that had managed to arrive. Of course they didn’t have anything else besides a 7 seat Mercedes van – at an extra £60/day. Um, no. We had a wonderful friend waiting to help us get the cases to Aberdeen if necessary and that was the only reason we needed the larger car so there was no way on this earth I was paying an extra £1300 for that. A little more discussion found a car of the right size for an additional £15/day and would actually take all the cases and be able to park in a normal parking space. So we were set.

Off to Stirling to pick up my BRP (Biometric Resident Permit – like a green card) and an old iPhone from Frank’s brother. A quick stop for lunch in Perth and we finally made it to Aberdeen in the early afternoon. We got the tour of the flat – which didn’t take long because it is very SMALL – and started to unpack. And that’s when we realized that all the “downsizing” we thought we had done was not going to be enough. We quickly ran out of hangers and drawer space. The first was easily remedied; the second will take some creativity. We had a quick dinner and managed to stay awake until all of 8:30pm!

A good nights sleep was just what the doctor ordered and then we had one day to prepare for Buddy to arrive. He landed in Manchester at 8:30 am and then got his doggy limo for the 6 hour trip north – arriving about 24 hours after us. It was so nice to have him arrive safe and sound! Of course he is very confused and doesn’t understand where his toys are or why he can’t sleep on the bed and what is all this nonsense about not barking? But he gets lots of rides in the car and now that we’ve customized our flat just a bit, it is feeling more like home. Of course it will be a while before we are really settled but stay tuned and we’ll tell you all about it. 🙂

PS. Yes, the errant bag arrived safe and sound (and completely drenched!) several hours after Buddy did. Not sure why it needed to make a pit stop in Amsterdam but some things will remain a mystery…..

It is remarkably unfair to lump something as emotional as saying goodbye to years of good friends with the mundane task of trying to get the suitcases to zip, but it’s necessary for me to keep my emotions in check. After all the FB Marketplace folderole, the DOZEN or so trips to Goodwill, and the foisting of our belongings on to friends and family, it was time to actually pack. We did a test run to try to get everything we wanted to take with us in the suitcases and it didn’t take long to realize there was no way on God’s green earth we were going to get everything in the cases we had. One of them was quite small so it became my carry on and Frank was off to Tuesday Morning to try to find a “cheap” suitcase. Luckily, he found a 28″ hard side which didn’t break the bank and we tried the whole “stuff everything in 6 cases (!?!)” thing again. Nope. Wasn’t going to work. So we shifted some stuff from the “packed” to “shipped” pile and thought we were fine.

Except for one thing: all the Christmas ornaments were in the “shipped” pile and we don’t expect to see the shipped goods until the new year. So they needed to get pulled out and put into the “packed” pile. But there was truly no more room there. So a new pile was born: to be mailed! Yes, we did go there. A small shipping box from the USPS would take the Christmas stuff (and some sweaters and other bulky-but-not-heavy items) so that solve that problem! Or so we thought….

The movers came on Thursday (3 hours late!) and packed up way more stuff than we put on the insurance forms (shhh! Don’t tell anyone!) And then the house really felt empty. Except that it wasn’t. As anyone who has ever moved knows, crap breeds in dark closets when no one is looking! So even though we *thought* we had the amount of stuff under control, it wasn’t even close, Jesse even came from Boston and took and entire car load of stuff back to Boston – and her wonderful partner took more than her fair share of stuff to try to save us. But alas, it would take 2 more boxes and about $500 in postage to get everything that wasn’t in our 6 suitcases to Aberdeen. Yes, we did walk into a UPS store in VA with a variety of things that were stuffed loose into the back of the rented minivan but would not fit in any of the cases. And yes, a kindly UPS employee packed up the crap that needed to go and shipped it from me to me. And yet we still had 2 of our 6 cases come in at more than 50 pounds. AAAAHHHHHH!

In the midst of all this was the packing for Buddy. All the paperwork finally came through and after a small screwup that meant that he got more than one de-worming treatment, he was ready to hit the road with us. Our rented minivan was chock full of cases and a monster dog crate and the canine king. We spent two nights in hotels along the route and he was beside himself, taking up a full half of the king sized beds while Frank and I shared the other half. But after all was said and done, he made his way to the pet transport lounge and was safely awaiting his flight to Frankfurt.

And while all this was going on, we had a parade of “lasts” – last row on the canal, last race with RBC, last dinner with this friend or that, last day of work, last time we’ll do XXX in Rochester. We managed to get through most of them without tears – or at least without anyone seeing our tears. While we enjoyed the place, the people are what we’ll miss most. Here is a small sample of the parade of important people. Please don’t feel that you didn’t rank if you aren’t in these photos – these are just what we could come up with between the laughter and the tears.

Of course it decided to snow the day we left so it felt like the appropriate way to say goodbye. See you all soon!

I’m still not sure if I get to check this box but I have to have something on my list that looks like it is done. We have done the bulk of the weeding out of all our possessions. Some of them are still in our house awaiting a new home (or the final trash pickup) but we’ve pretty much decided what category which item belongs in. My inner librarian was very happy to devise a controlled vocabulary for classifying things: Goodwill, Rubbish, Packing, Shipping.

This formality was necessary because our shorthanded language during the purge activity led to all kinds of confusion. Frank would pick something up and look at me inquisitively and I would just respond with “That has to go.” Unfortunately, we had different default setting for what “go” meant. I generally meant that something had to go out – as in Goodwill or Trash – and he generally interpreted it as it need to go with us – either Packed or Shipped. So we had many entertaining “arguments” over which pile something needed to be in. (It’s always a data quality problem – in this case it was a metadata quality problem. My nerdiness knows no bounds.)

Of course all of this had to be accomplished in order to fill out the paperwork. And there is SO MUCH PAPERWORK! I now have sympathy for people who move to a new country under a tourist visa and just stay. I do wonder if this is one case where the adage about asking forgiveness rather than permission might apply. But we are both first-born children and so we are the rule followers. And there are so many rules to follow.

First the lengthy process of getting the visa sorted. That involved multiple online forms, multiple online payments, and a trip to Boston. Next the process of getting the dog sorted. That involved more forms, more payments, and so many trips to the vet that I think we need to invite Dr. Thornton to our house for Christmas. Of course there are plenty of payments there too but holy animal wellness Batman – what a process. This is one of the ones that is still up in the air. We have done all the paperwork we can do and submitted all the forms to the requisite places in order to get Buddy’s health certificate. We did this WEEKS ago. And yet we still are waiting for word from the USDA office in Albany. I think this box gets half a check because we’ve done all we can even though it isn’t fully resolved. We do have Buddy’s travel arrangements (more forms and more payments) and he’s scheduled to leave on the same day as us but he flies through Frankfurt where he has a 22 hour layover in a premium pet facility (more forms and payments) before boarding a flight to Manchester where he’ll be vetted through customs before a van delivers him to us in Aberdeen two days later (yup, more forms and payments).

Unfortunately, all this might be for nought if we don’t get the health certificate. Even our government customs paperwork is waiting for that. I completed as much as I could – including the list of everything we are bringing with us – so that we don’t have to pay UK duty on it. But without the health certificate, I may need to pay duty on the dog. Don’t tell him but as a rescue we estimated his value at £100. Of course he’s priceless to us – I feel the need to add that as if he would actually read this! – but if we don’t get the Transfer of Residence approval for him, which is dependent on the health certificate, then we’ll have to pay between £30 – £50 duty on the dog. Not that it matters because if we don’t have the health certificate, he can’t go so here we are. Paperwork done but not done. {sigh}

So we continue to whittle down the booze collection that can’t go with us – with the help of friends of course or our livers would be toast – and wait for the last of our belongings to make their way from their assigned pile to their final destination. It looks like our bed will go today so it’s air mattress camping for the last week. The movers take their pile on Thursday – an estimated 1145 items according the insurance form – so that’s when it gets really interesting. Keep an eye out for those tales to come!