Jan 13 2012

Au revoir to our Car (and dog and cat)

by DaleTags: 90 day adventure | travel without pets

Yesterday we drove 8 hours non-stop to Las Vegas to see our neighbor and drop off our dog and cat, to whom she has graciously agreed to “baby sit” while we are on our 90 day adventure. The next morning, which happened to be Friday the 13th, we picked up some more supplies, went to the airport, checked our bags and boarded our flight to LAX. Later that night we boarded our Air France flight to Papeete, Tahiti. We arrived safely but not without a little excitement.

The title of this post is my attempt to practice my very limited French, since we will be faced with a lot of it on the flight today and in Tahiti. Yesterday Margaret drove the entire 8 hours to Las Vegas (she loves to drive) while I worked on finishing our picture/blog volume of books highlighting our 2010 trip around South America (I love to write). Our neighbor, Dema, who also has a house in Vegas, has graciously agreed to look after our miniature poodle, Spencer, and Persian cat, Alex, while we are on our 90 day adventure. Dema happens to be the “mom” of Spencer’s best friend, Mimi, who is a white miniature poodle. Dema has previously had three kitty cats but has been feline-less for many years. She is excited to have the company of Spencer and Alex for the next 3 months. Thank you Dema, we are much more comfortable knowing you are looking after our puppy and kitty cat!

After dinner at Dema’s, we got Alex settled in his room, he is going to be spoiled for the next 3 months as he has everything he needs including a “kitty” door out to a backyard that looks like Disneyland, including a pool surrounded by rocks and waterfalls. What more could a kitty cat ask for? Mimi has never had a cat around so she is anxious to chase Alex, not realizing he knows his way around dogs and has a mean left claw punch. I am sure she’ll figure out soon enough that if you chase a cat you will get whacked!

We woke up today and had to go out and get some last minute supplies. We went to REI to get some lightweight shorts for me, and a lightweight backpack for Margaret. When pulling up to park we noticed that there were 20 or more handicap spots and we wondered how many handicapped people shopped at an outdoor adventure store? No sooner had we walked in the door when we ran into an older man and yes, he was in a wheelchair! I guess we were wrong in judging. Good for him!

Back at the house, Margaret worked on getting our 3 large, soon to be checked bags, to weigh no more than 50 pounds each. I had bought a hand-held bag weigher and I was helping Margaret figure out which bags needed to be lighter, etc. It turned out this was quite a chore!

Before you know it we were on our way to the airport where there thankfully, was very little traffic. We unloaded our bags and proceeded to work closely with a nice Southwest associate to get the bags checked. Of course, my hand-held weighing device turned out to be off by 1 pound so we had to find a way to offload 1 pound out of all three bags. Then, after we had it all worked out, he put the baggage tag on one of them and voila! (I’m practicing my French again), it was off by half a pound. Ugh! More shuffling around, which meant more stuff went into Margaret’s carry on. We ended up bonding with our Southwest baggage helper and got some pictures to prove it!

We arrived safely at LAX, collected our checked bags, and set out from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2. We again fought our way through security, that this time included Margaret’s Parisian shirt with some “bling” getting a pat-down and my roll-a-board camera bag getting an explosives check. We found an electrical outlet (my cell phone was almost dead) in a restaurant area, had a quick dinner and a drink and an hour and half later we boarded our Air France flight to Papeete. After getting settled into our seats, we downed a 1/2 Ambien each and drifted off to sleep.

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