The last 24 hours in the US, for a while anyway - Part 3

As soon as I stepped onto the plane, I asked the flight attendant "can you please confirm for me when my two cats are onboard?" He looked at me a little strange - it might have been the fact that there were tears rolling down my cheeks as I asked - and said he would check on it. I got into my seat (actually, the seat in front of my seat - I didn't pay enough attention to where I was sitting when I sat down in 23F instead of 24F) and watched as the cargo dudes loaded the bags into the belly of the plane. I was trying to see whether they also loaded the cats, but I had been told that the cats and mail go in last at the very rear of the plane, so it was unlikely I would see them.

Doors started shutting, both at the front and under the plane, and the little dude hadn't come back to tell me that my cats were on. Nevermind the fact that I have been more or less constantly crying throughout the whole boarding and loading process. I rang the little call button above my head and another flight attendant was immediately there. "Can you please let me know if my two cats are on the plane?" I asked again, in tears. He told me he would check on it right away. I texted a message to DH, letting him know I was on the plane and waiting to hear if the kitties were too. I sat there, weeping, until it was clear that the plane was just about to push back from the gate. I panicked a little - no one had confirmed that the kitties were onboard. As soon as I felt us rockback from the gate, the flight attendant (the second one) came by and said not to worry, the two cats had been loaded on. I totally broke down into full blown tears, with a couple of sighs and sobs, and the poor woman sitting next to me took pity on me, trying to reassure me that everything would be okay.

What it really was at that moment was a wave of all the things that had happened in the last six months at that point just cresting and crashing down on me. All that waiting, the separation from DH and going through 90% of the move alone was for that moment... getting our two kitties on the plane on their way to England with me. Lots of people would say that we were nuts allowing two animals to dictate our lives like that, but they are our kids, they are our charges, and we simply aren't a complete family without them.

Anyway, I cried off and on for the next 2.5 hours, I think. We were stuck on the taxiway for 25 minutes or so because of heavy air traffic, and the flight itself was one of the most turbulent I've been on, which had me worrying about the kitties the whole time. I tried to take my mind off of everything going on that I had no control over - watching the atrocious "Baby Mama" and listening to "Sense and Sensibility" via my little personal entertainment center in the back of the chair in front of me. Thankfully it got me through 4 hours of the 5.5 hours flight.

With about 1.5 hours to go, I started the waterworks again. There were times during the flight when I was convinced that I could hear the cats crying in the hold below (probably not) At this point, the final barrier to completing this move was British customs not letting the cats come home with us. Our bumpy flight was rewarded with a smooth landing, and we pulled into the gate in Manchester, and I anxiously watched out my window to see if I could catch them unloading the cats from the plane. No such luck again, and I made my way through the aiport, through immigration and customs (the cats were going through cargo customs away from the airport proper), and into DH's arms. We quickly loaded everything into our estate car (british name for a station wagon, and thank God for it, since we needed almost every inch of space for all the stuff and drove off to the freight facility to collect the kitties.