Budget Trouble

Pet Friendly Pension Animale in Nikko

The cats were not too keen on a road trip. But that’s normal. As soon as their travel carriers come out of storage, they run and hide. And frankly, I can’t blame them. If I were my cat, I’d hate to travel, too. Poor guys, they’ve been through a lot, that’s for sure. So when we had to go to Nikko a couple of weekends ago, we wanted our “kids” to be comfortable.

Enter Pension Animale.

Pension Animale is a pet friendly hotel in Nikko, and after calling and confirming that their definition of pets included cat as well (many hotels when they say “pets welcome” mean “dogs OK, cats no”) we booked a room.

But why would we want to stay at a hotel if we live only about 20 kms away? Being too lazy to drive back and forth both days certainly had something to do with it. Especially since it was going to snow and we didn’t (and still don’t) have snow tires. See? We might be stupid most of the time, that’s for sure, but every once in a while we do have a sensible idea.

Anyway, back to Pension Animale…

There were no rooms with private bathrooms available for that night, so we had no choice but to get a room with a shared bath. The price seemed a bit steep, but with zero other options (as it very frequently happens when traveling with pets), we booked it.

However, at the very last minute it turned out that Little Cousin was available to cat sit, so when we arrived at Pension Animale, it was just us. The cats stayed at home. And we left the kotatsu on for them, too.

The pension is a bit out of the way, but still in Nikko. It’s a cheerful house in a very quiet, wooded neighborhood.

Pension Animale during daytime

When we arrived in the evening, the whole area seemed absolutely deserted. And the woods were cold and dark and dreary.

The establishment is run by the Hiratas, a very cute young couple from Tokyo. They took over the business last November and are still full of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed enthusiasm. Even though they did say that Nikko was a lot colder than what they were used to and that there were bugs even in the midst of winter.

The pension itself is very basic. Our room was nicely heated when we got there, but there was no heater in the bathroom and in the toilet. Not even a warmlet (heated toilet seat), which is positively spartan by Japanese standards. To put things in perspective, it was below zero that night and there’s no central heating in Japan.

Our room. It could sleep four, and yes, a hairdyer was provided.

The dining area was bright and cheery and we were greeted by two barking pups that were enjoying dinner with their humans. That’s what makes Pension Animale different from other pet friendly hotels – here you can take your furkids with you everywhere in the building, including the dining room.

"When will they finish eating? I'm booooored..."

"Ohhhh... I'm so stuffed, time for a nap."

Dinner (French style) was prepared by Kenji the manager himself, he’s an excellent chef and cooks every night. My only complaint was that the portions were rather small. After vacuuming everything on my plates I was still starving. I’m not a huge person, quite the opposite, and I don’t think we eat extravagant amounts of food. But apparently what is enough for your average Japanese is just appetizers for us.

Because after dinner we were still hungry, we hopped in the car and drove to a 24-hour Sunkus to get more stuff to eat. And it seemed that at least half of Nikko had the same idea, the convenience store looked like a refugee camp. People were buying whatever was left on the nearly bare shelves. Dr. Trouble had a cup ramen (curry flavor), I ate a stale tuna sandwich.

Incidentally, my Japanese friends (and even one Nikko restaurant owner) echoed my complaint. Hotel dinner portions in Nikko are not big enough, especially if you are very hungry after a full day of walking outside (which is what you normally do in Nikko).

One woman said flat out that when booking a pension in Chuzenji, she asks very detailed questions about dinners. Because if you’re still hungry after dinner, there’s no place to buy food – you need to drive 16 kms to Nikko proper to the nearest convenience store. Which will be that bare shelfed 24-hour Sunkus we visited.

Ok, back to Pension Animale…

There are two onsens – one indoor western style (with a very cool underwater lightup) and one outdoor Japanese style. And yes, you can take your pets with you when you take a bath.

Outdoor onsen in January? Thanks, I'll pass.

As my hatred of Japanese style baths is legendary, I did not try them. Dr Trouble did, he said they were nice. There was also a bathtub in the shared bathroom in the main building. I passed on that too and because it was just too bloody freezing to take a shower, I was seriously considering going stinky that day.

Shared bathroom

Eventually, I did brave a 30-second shower in the morning, that was all one could safely take without suffering from hypothermia.

The whole experience set us back almost 18 000 yen (total for two people). It included one night’s stay, two dinners, two breakfasts, and two onsen baths (of which only one was taken). If you’re traveling with pets that might be a good deal, because otherwise you’d have to pay for a pet hotel for your dogs or cats. But if you end up coming without your animals (like us that day), then sorry, but for what Pension Animale offers, this is a ridiculous rate.

There are much better hotels in Nikko with similar prices. And they have heated bathrooms, or at least warmlets.

But a litter box waiting in our room was a very sweet touch. I was ready to bring our own anyway.

World Where You Live - or my 2009 in pictures

2009 was a rather boring year. I didn't get arrested. I didn't spend a night in jail. I didn't even get a speeding ticket. There was zero excitement, adventure and really wild things. Instead, there was plenty of packing and moving, and packing and moving again... But other than that, we are all more or less healthy, the cats are more or less still alive and life just goes on, more or less as usual.

So, here's my 2009 in pictures.

JANUARY

January saw us sleeping at Gatwick, but can you believe it -  in an actual bed (Yotel) and not on an airport bench. Sheesh, we've turned so bourgeois... I'm almost embarrassed.

And in Antigua we learned a valuable lesson:

That you should never let drunk strangers (or Brits, but that's pretty much one and the same) take important photos.

FEBRUARY

We were busy packing and preparing to move. The only problem was we were not entirely sure where we were moving. Yeah, it was fun. Sort of.

And please don't ask me how we managed to get approval for pet import to Japan in less than the prescribed 40 days. Let's just say it was magic. On the last day of February we were all ready to go:

At Narita

MARCH

I spent a lot of time at a lot of different airports: Narita, Helsinki, Copenhagen (gotta love those 17 hour layovers). After only a week in Japan, I returned to Sweden for 4 days. During 3 of those days I managed to drive up and down the better part of Scandinavia and catch a ferry to Poland. Oh, and did I mention that the driving was done during the last snowstorm of the season and in a car without studded tires?

High Coast Bridge

After all this frantic driving, I returned to Japan.

APRIL

Not sure what happened in April, whatever it was it must have been rather boring, or I was simply too jet-lagged to notice...

somewhere in Utsunomiya

And then I returned to Europe for a couple of months.


MAY

The plan was to visit the UK and do other exciting things as well (I was dreaming about Belarus) but  I ended up staying in Poland. Why? Budget trouble, duh!

in Gdansk

I went to Hel and back, visited an upside down house, learned to speak Kashubian and ate a lot. And I mean - a lot.

There was also the Eurovision song contest and this year the best song actually did win. Whoa!

JUNE

After one last frantic Polish road trip and almost getting my face burned off by a fire eater in Torun:

in Torun (I should maybe write something about Torun, it's an interesting place)

I hopped on a plane and returned to Japan. To make it more exciting, I flew via Warsaw, Toronto and Vancouver. That in retrospect proved to be a very dumb idea, because somewhere between Toronto and Narita my bras and most of underwear disappeared from my luggage. I sent in a complaint to Air Canada but so far - no answer. Oh well...

JULY

Started a new job, schlepped all over Tochigi and did nothing much.

at a museum in Moka

AUGUST

There was the annual Miya Matsuri (Utsunomiya festival) in August and even though it rained that day, I went downtown to take a look.



Yeah, nothing professes your love for the company you work for like marching to music in the drizzle while performing highly coordinated hand movements. They call it "dance", I call it "looking like an idiot." Either way, it's fine by me, as long as I don't have to do it.


SEPTEMBER

Patrick Swayze died.



I saw this sign when we were still in Sweden. Just a random neon on a random building in Umeå.
I love that movie. Oh, shut up, you know you do too.


OCTOBER

We moved to a new apartment. It's small, but at least one of the cats seems to like it:



I like it too, because small means a lot less cleaning.

NOVEMBER

Autumn came and went in November and frankly, I was too busy to notice...

next to my workplace in Imaichi (Nikko)

DECEMBER

That's when I finally decided I should be updating this blog a lot more often. And oh yeah, there was Hanukkah and Christmas and a few other things. And I ate. A lot.

Ashikaga Flower Park

And that's pretty much it. Let's hope that 2010 will be much more exciting...

Staying with Pets at Hilton Narita Airport Hotel

Finding a hotel somewhere nearby Narita Airport is easy. But finding one that accepts travelers with pets - now, that’s a lot more complicated.

There are travel websites that claim there are three or four hotels at Narita that accommodate guests with pets. That is absolutely NOT true. We have emailed more than 30 different establishments, and as of February/March 2009, there is only one that accepts travelers with cats and/or dogs. That hotel is Hilton Narita Airport. Most others suggested we drop off our cats at the Pet Hotel at the airport. Now, I don’t know about you, but for us that was not an option. Our cats are our children, and would you leave your child overnight with unknown strangers? Especially when your child is scared, hungry, dehydrated and disoriented in a new place? And please don’t tell me that pets are not kids, because to me, and millions of other pet owners, they are.

So, Hilton Narita Airport it was. And that's when things got funky.

When I asked for a normal room for two people, I was quoted the rate of 11 000 yen per night. When I mentioned that those two people would have two cats, the rate jumped up to 24 000 yen!!! That is more than a 100% increase! WTF?!?!

Maybe the management at Hilton Narita thinks that only rich bitches travel with their pets? Or the likes of Paris Hilton, perhaps? If that’s the case, then it’s about time that someone told them otherwise. Listen up Hilton Hotels! Plenty of normal, average, middle-class folks go on trips (sometimes even on long, intercontinental journeys) with their cats and dogs. And to screw them over on room rates like that is so not cool.

But then again, this is business, you know there’s no competition for you around Narita, and so you can charge as much as you want. Still, for doing that you guys are total pricks, and when traveling without our cats, we definitely won’t be staying at any of your hotels either. Nice way to lose potential customers, you Hilton morons!

50% higher I could have understood, but 120%? Give me a break! For that kind of money, I half expected separate beds with feather duvets for my cats. Instead, all we got was a dog enclosure and a water bowl. Of course, the dog cage was of no use for two cats, and we brought our own pet food dishes anyway. And our own litter box.

We also had to hand over a deposit of 30 000 yen and call for a room inspection before proceeding with check-out.

So, all things considered, would we stay there again when traveling with our cats? Are you kidding me? I think it would have worked out cheaper lining the litter box with dollar bills and sleeping at the airport than staying at Hilton Narita.

Bringing Pets to Japan from Rabies-Free Countries

The cats survived the trip from Europe to Japan rather nicely and now behave as if they’ve been living here all their lives. Though the pain and discomfort of the ordeal is not yet forgotten (and I doubt it will ever be) - as soon as their pet taxis are taken out of storage, the cats run and hide. They know the bags mean trouble.

And I can’t blame them. If you were forced to sit squashed in a tiny space for an indescribably long period of time (which I’m sure that’s exactly how 18 hours feel to a cat and most people I know), you’d have some serious trauma, too.

My unhappy camper getting ready to board the flight.

Of course, whenever possible, and even several times during the flight, we took them out of the carriers, massaged their legs and let them stretch out. And because we did that in the airplane bathroom (the one with the changing table), as you can easily imagine, some passengers were not amused. Oh well, their problem. As I told one particularly nasty prick (who was old and traveled alone, if he had an infant, I would have been more understanding) – I don’t see any cats here, only babies wearing fur, and they deserve their time on the nappy changing table too.

“What? You want them to piss in the isle?” I asked the prick. That shut him up.

And FYI, we always cover the table with disposable hospital liners (the ones used for babies and patients with incontinence), so the cats never take one step on any unprotected surface. They never leave the table. And after we finish, the liners are thrown out, and the table is cleaned with anti-bacterial wipes. I might be a crazy cat lady, but I have my moments of common sense. ;)

Also, to be able to transport a cat across international borders, the cat MUST be declared disease and parasite free - you should have seen the tests and treatments these poor kids had to go through before the trip! So, the only thing we were unable to help our fellow passengers with were any potential cat allergies.

Relaxing at the airport in Helsinki

Of course, the cats didn’t piss, and wouldn’t piss anywhere either way. That was the main reason why we chose the shortest connection and subjected ourselves to the Finnair treatment.

By the time we got to Narita, I could tell the cats were desperate for a litterbox. Even though we didn’t give them any food or water the day before the trip, after nearly 18 hours spent in their pet taxis, they really had to go. In more ways than one.

However, first we had to go through the pet quarantine procedure. Technically, for pets coming from rabies-free countries, there is no quarantine upon arrival in Japan. There is, however, quite a lot of paperwork to submit, file, check and sign. And the cats need to be inspected by an official vet at Narita before they can be released to you.

This is how it works:

1.    Before you fly to Japan, at least 40 days before your intended arrival, you need to submit a "notification of import of animals" form. You will then receive an "approval of import inspection of animals" document along with an approval number from the Animal Quarantine Service in Japan. Then you will need to fill out two additional forms (forms A and B, one of which needs to be signed and stamped by your normal veterinarian) and get them certified by an official government vet in your country. And you may also need a third form, an annex, if your flight itinerary involves a stop-over in a third country, or to certify that the container with the animal has not be opened during transit (if going as cargo).

2.    Once in Japan, proceed through the passport control as usual. In the Customs area, head to the Animal Quarantine desk. Over there, a clerk will look up your pet’s approval number and tell you what to do next. Hint – have the original of the "approval of import inspection of animals" paperwork ready, depending on a clerk on duty, your filled, signed and stamped forms A and B, both containing the freakin' approval number, may not be enough. What can I say, Japan loves its bureaucracy.

3.    The clerk on duty will give you a piece of paper, which you will need to give to a customs officer to get it stamped. You will also get a map to the Quarantine Office. Then you hand your pets over to the Animal Quarantine clerk at the desk and off you go.

4.    On your usual yellow customs declaration form don’t forget to write you are bringing live animals into the country. Show your customs declaration and the paper you got from the Animal Quarantine desk to the customs officer. He will keep the declaration, but make sure that after stamping the Animal Quarantine paper, he gives it back to you! You will need to show it at the Quarantine Office upstairs to collect your pet.

5.    Follow the maze to get to the Quarantine Office upstairs. At least, it was upstairs in Terminal 2. It’s a bit complicated, so don’t hesitate to ask for directions. On the departures level, you will pass through a guarded door into a “staff-only” area. After that, take the elevator to the 6th floor.

6.    Upstairs, the appropriate office is clearly marked, just open the door, go in and take a seat and wait your turn.

7.    Your pet’s paperwork will be EXTREMELY carefully checked, line by line, letter by letter, number by number by an anal-retentive official. Any discrepancy between what you wrote on the initial "notification of import of animals" form and your current forms A and B and the Annex will be questioned and investigated. Forms, which bear the stamp of your country’s official government veterinarian are as sacred as the Holy Bible.
On our "notification of import of animals" application we listed our cat’s color as “brown”, then our vet listed it as “orange” on Form A. But since our vet’s form was later stamped by the government veterinarian, the color of the cat needed to be changed to “orange” in the Quarantine Office computers and a new document had to be printed out.

8.    Your pet will be waiting for you behind the desk. Pick up the bag and go to the next room where a veterinarian will take over. The microchip will be read, the pet will be examined, you will be asked questions: “are your pets well behaved?” and “any vomiting or diarrhea within the last three days?” and “how do you think they feel?” and so on. The vet was competent and thorough, he understood our cats were tired and scared.

9.    After the health-check, go back to the other room to sign the arrival paperwork. If everything is deemed to be in order, you are free to go.

10.    Your sweet fluffies are now officially in Japan.

The whole process took us about 30 minutes. It would have been shorter, if not for the brown-orange issue in the paperwork. By the way, if there are issues, make sure the Japanese official doesn’t make any spelling mistakes, our clerk misspelled “orange”, which resulted in additional corrections and wasted time.

While waiting to get the paperwork corrected, we saw one rabbit and two cats being processed. The rabbit went very quickly. The cats were in hard containers (came in as cargo, I assume) and were handled by a pet moving company. Their processing dragged on and on.

The above applies to pets from rabies-free countries, which are listed as: Sweden, Norway, Iceland, UK (Great Britain and Northern Ireland only), Ireland, Guam, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, Fiji and Taiwan.

But before you make any plans to bring your pets to Japan, make sure to get the scoop from the official Animal Quarantine Service website.

%*$@%# Finnair! (Yet Another Airline Rant)

With budget airlines, like Ryanair and Wizzair, you know exactly that you get what you paid for. You don’t expect much in terms of service or quality, and that’s understandable.

They’re called “budget” for a reason. But when you fly on a standard airline that claims to be Northern Europe’s gateway to Asia, you think you can anticipate, at the very least, an appearance of service. Unfortunately, Finnair fails on all accounts. That’s the reason why I normally avoid it like a nasty virulent plague. All it can offer you are short connection times in Helsinki and luggage delivered to your home when your bags don’t make those said short connections. And that happens quite often.

But there came a time when I needed short connections, and so in January, with a heavy heart I booked us two tickets from Stockholm to Tokyo on Finnair. We were taking our cats to Japan and wanted to make the trip as short as possible. Should have known right there and then that it was going to be an utter disaster.

Since you can’t book pets as cabin luggage on the internet, I had to call. And it took three days of phone calls to get the matter resolved and confirmed. Each time we were assured that “someone will call you back.” Needless to say, nobody ever did. And since the fees for making a phone booking are substantially higher than on the internet, it wasn’t exactly a budget-friendly proposition. You’d think that if an airline is going to charge you 50 euro per ticket for a phone booking, it should provide a minimum of service. Alas, not Finnair.

I am typing this while flying back to Europe. On Finnair, unfortunately. And I’ve been thinking long and hard what sort of nice things I can say about this airline. Just to be fair, you know. Hmmm… The planes are new and clean. There’s plenty of water to drink. You get a toothbrush and toothpaste (but no socks). I like the 2-4-2 seat configuration. We’re talking about economy here, of course. The entertainment screen is big. Too bad it didn’t work when I turned it on, both on the way to Japan and back. It had to be manually reset. The flight attendant said it was a common problem. Then why nobody bothered to reset the bloody thing BEFORE the flight? She didn’t have an answer to that question.

Speaking of entertainment systems. Even though we’re already six days into March and the new film schedule is already provided in the seat pocket in front of me, the screen still shows the old stuff from January and February. The flight attendant said it normally takes “a while” to update the programming. When asked to define “a while” she didn’t have an answer. Hint – " a while" is definitely longer than six days.

Speaking of flight attendants. There was a problem with my armrest and I pushed the call button. It took a flight member 47 minutes  (yes, I was bored and I timed it) to finally get to my seat. And it wasn’t during a meal service. This, I have to say, is an all-time slow for any airline I’ve ever flown on. I shudder at the thought if my need had been an urgent one, a medical problem for example. I’d be dead in my seat by now, especially since there isn’t anyone sitting next to me to get help.

What else? The food is horrid. But by now I'm used to horrid food served in economy on European airlines. They gotta reduce costs somehow, you know?

And I suppose in an effort to reduce costs (and customer service) even further, Finnair’s ground service at Arlanda was sub-contracted to a handling agent – Menzies. The firm handles ground operations for all members of One World Alliance at Arlanda, and that is reason enough for me never to fly on a One World partner airline out of Stockholm. The individuals working for Menzies are so nasty that even Finnair’s very own flight attendant working the Stockholm-Helsinki route agreed they are a bunch of pricks. She also implied they get paid bonuses based on the number of extra fees they managed to collect.

That goes a long way to explaining the mystery of why our luggage, which when weighed at home and by SAS on a connecting flight to Stockholm, was 22 kgs a piece, suddenly became almost 25 kgs per bag when put on a Menzies scale at Finnair’s check-in counter. This is an old scam, a couple of years ago KLM tried it on me at Barajas in Madrid. But that time I knew my luggage wasn’t overweight and demanded  to have it re-weighed at a different airline’s scale. KLM suddenly gave up and told me I didn’t have to pay for excess weight. Sure, because I knew there wasn’t any.

This time we knew we had overweight bags. The question was by how much. I was fully prepared to pay for 4 kilos, because that’s how much the bags weighed that morning (two bags at 22 kgs each; two passengers). But the Menzies sourpuss at the check-in counter said "10 kilos." At 30 euros per kilo it was cheaper to start throwing things out than pay the fee. Note to Finnair – this is a VERY dumb way of collecting excess luggage fees, if it’s cheaper for the passengers to buy new stuff when they reach their destination, duh.

In the confusion at the check-in desk, while weighing the cat containers, we put the same container on the scale twice. Each time it registered a different weight, once 6 kilos, the second time – over 7. Very odd indeed. When we pointed this out to the woman manning the check-in desk, she became agitated and just plain rude. Whatever. We went to repack our bags.

Upon returning to the check-in counter, we found a new agent on duty. Just like his predecessor, he had all the attitude of a rabid skunk with an IQ level of a stool sample. It was time to weigh our cabin luggage. Thanks to the amazing scales, it was also overweight. We were instructed to remove the excess weight. We simply stuffed things into our pockets and when the bags came off the scales, we put all of it right back. The utter lack of logic of this exercise in futility was totally lost of the Menzies moron working there. But then again, hey, what can I say? He was Swedish, and after five years in Sweden I knew you couldn’t expect a Swede to think rationally.

His behavior was so rude, and because he wasn’t wearing a name tag (none of the Menzies check-in people was, come to think of it) I asked for his name. He grew agitated and totally belligerent. When I attempted to take his photo, he threatened us with “you put it down (while pointing at my camera) or you won’t fly today.” Because he knew it was an empty threat, and I pointed out as much to him, he responded with “at least your luggage won’t fly today.”

The jerk (I wanted to use a stronger word here, but let’s keep this a PG blog) marked our checked-in bags as stand-by luggage. How’s that for great customer service for you? Needless to say, we were not stand-by passengers. We’d been fully paid and confirmed for a month and both our flights were not fully booked. And there was no stand-by mark on our boarding passes.

Note to Finnair – this is a perfect example of how to lose customers in a hurry.

 

Compare this with the experience at Narita. My bag was slightly over the 20 kg limit, but the check-in girl didn’t even bat an eye. She was more concerned with my seat preference. Out of curiosity I asked her what they do when a suitcase is significantly heavier than the limit.

She said: “a little overweight, like about 22 kilos, is normally OK, it’s hard to pack exactly, we understand that. More than 22 or so, we give a box and suggest the person to mail the excess weight to their destination, or to their home. Post office is right over there (she pointed to a window opposite check-in banks C and B) and it’s cheaper to mail a package than to pay overweight fees.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, will never happen at Arlanda. Not in a million years. That’s the difference between Sweden and Japan. But I stopped expecting any semblance of customer service in Sweden a long time ago.

The sad part is, I really like Helsinki as an airport and I wouldn’t mind transiting through there. The saddest part is that in this harsh economy when airlines are struggling financially and when every passenger should count, Finnair doesn’t seem to care in the least bit.

I will be returning to Japan in two weeks, and then again in a couple of months. This year it looks like I might make as many as six round trips between Europe and Japan. And you betcha they won’t be on Finnair. Goodbye and good riddance!

PS. I should have known that the Menzies check-in staff was not quite all there when the woman looked through my passport and told me that I didn't have a visa. No, I didn't have a visa, because I didn't need one. Her answer? "But you have a Polish passport!"

Can somebody please tell those morons that Poles can travel to Japan (and many other countries) visa free? And that the cold war had ended years ago? Because it looks like they never got the memo.

How to Lose Your Sanity in 20 Days

Ok, guys, sorry I haven’t posted in a while. This move seems more difficult than the ones we survived in the past. Or maybe I’m simply getting older? And lazier?

Either way, my postings will be less frequent until about March 11th. That is, if I survive until then. Because in the next 20 days this is what’s in store for me:

-    going to Poland to apply for new documents (yes, again)
-    returning to Sweden
-    cleaning the apartment
-    packing and convincing my long-suffering neighbor to store some stuff for me
-    getting the cats ready for the ordeal
-    flying to Japan with two screaming cats
-    dealing with paperwork in Japan
-    flying back to Europe
-    driving to the Arctic (without studded tires, yes, suicide, I know)
-    picking the stuff up from my saintly neighbor
-    driving down to Stockholm
-    getting on a ferry, the car and all
-    making it to Poland, hopefully in one piece.

All of that in the next 20 days.
Wish me luck!

When cats fly...

Much has been written about traveling with pets. And the bulk of it, seemingly, by people for whom the word “pet” is synonymous with “dog*”.

I travel with cats. My cats clocked in more frequent flier miles than most humans I know. Every move, be it cross country, or across the oceans, is carefully evaluated from the point of view of a cat. I passed on a lucrative job offer in Australia due to their stringent pet quarantine requirements, and I’m not so keen on moving to the UK for the very same reason. My cats are my children, and no sane parent I know would voluntarily subject their pride and joy to the ordeal of forced quarantine.

My orange tabby is a veteran of long distance travel. His first inter-continental move brought him from Nara in Japan, via Los Angeles to Manhattan. Not too shabby for an abandoned, little stray! And his travels are not limited to airlines. He’s one of the few, special felines that completed a cross-country road trip – from New York to Seattle.

The trans-Atlantic move to Sweden was also carefully designed with the comfort and wellbeing of a Japanese shorthair in mind. The trip was broken into several legs, with overnight stays at kitty-friendly hotels in Chicago and Stockholm. The airlines were chosen based on their pet in the cabin policies, because sure as hell, my kids are NOT flying as checked luggage.

Cats travel remarkably well. They’re naturally squashy, and a proper carry-on bag ensures their comfort. Their biggest dangers are dehydration and constipation. The meticulously clean creatures that they are, they will refrain from doing their business inside the carrier. Don’t make it hard on them and their bowels and bladders – limit their food intake a day before the trip.

Just as humans on airplanes get dry and thirsty, so do cats. To ease their discomfort, I ask for a cup of ice and place it inside their carry-on. They’re reluctant at first, but as the ice melts, they can enjoy a little drink of cold water.

I am currently contemplating yet another inter-continental move with my feline children. This time to Seoul. Lucky us, Korea doesn’t require a pet quarantine for cats coming from Sweden. All there is to it is an inspection by a government veterinarian upon arrival at Incheon. Oh, the blessings of living in a rabies-free country!

Traveling inter-continentally with cats is not as bad as it sounds. Cats are tough little creatures. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

•    Have your paperwork in order. Start the preparations for your cat’s travel well ahead of time. Depending on the country of your destination (like for example Sweden or Japan) the requirements may be quite convoluted.

•    Assuming that your paperwork is in order, your cat - micro-chipped, and your pet booking is confirmed, call the airline yet again and reconfirm. And then do it a few more times. You don’t want to show up at the airport and discover that your precious fluffy has to travel as cargo, because some faceless automaton screwed up your pet-in-the-cabin booking.

•    Measure your cat carrier case. SAS is EVIL when it comes to that. Delta, JAL and Iberia were a breeze. So was Northwest and LOT Polish Airlines. And Air France. But the pet lovers at SAS whipped out a tape measure and proceeded to tell me that me airline-approved Sherpa bag was too big for travel in the cabin. What saved me was printing out the SAS instructions (scroll to number 18) from their own website recommending the very Sherpa bag they were telling me was too big.

•    24 hours before the trip, skip the food. I keep water available, and never had a problem. Plastic incontinence liners (like the ones used for old people and children, who pee in bed) are great for the bottom of the pet carrier. Just chuck them on arrival and line the bag with a new one. Easy peasy.

•    Cat harness and a leash. Essential, especially when going through airport security. Though some moronic, half-literate TSA screener could tell you that you have to take the harness off. My response – I’d sue the TSA’s bums off, if my cat escapes during their security check. The harness and leash stayed on.

•    On the plane, not much to do, other than spritz water on your babies, but that depends on the length of your flight. If you feel ambitious, take the carrier bag to the toilet, and let your baby out for a few minutes.

•    When arriving, if it’s an international flight, look for a bored customs official and thrust your pet import forms into his hands. Chances are, they won’t know what to do with them and will just wave you through. Or, they will lead you to a special room where you will spend the next few hours waiting for the approved vet to inspect your furry kids.

•    During a lay-over, get your cats out of the pet case and massage their legs to get the circulation going. You know, like your legs hurt like crazy? So do theirs! Your poor baby had to sit for many hours in a very uncomfortable position and is sore and stiff. Massage and rub like crazy. And give water. And let them walk around and explore a little.

•    Repeat the procedure for the second leg of your trip, until you reach your final destination.

I am a bit obsessive and travel with a disposable litter pan and a can of litter in my carry-on luggage, and during lay-overs look for a quite place to set up a cat bathroom. I have done it in a human restroom, in a prayer/mediation area, and in a club lounge, in other words, anywhere I can get away with it.

And a note about water. Frequently, tap water is disgusting. Many cats, especially fixed males, develop kidney/bladder problems, and require a low magnesium, low mineral diet. That includes water. Bottled water in many countries in Europe has minerals added to it, not to mention carbonation. Our friendly suggested distilled water, or purified water without any additives. But when buying bottled water at the airport to give to your cats, READ the labels. And think about (tap) water at your final destination!

(*) I couldn’t care less about dogs. They are nasty little creatures that make too much noise, force you to go outside in the dead of winter, and then still shit on the carpet without any remorse!