Our cats, Roxy and Yum Yum, demanded a year in France. The French cuisine beckoned and, of course, we did not want to be without them. So, we booked their cargo spots, bought new cages, sorted out pre-trip paperwork, and voila, boarded our flight from Houston to Paris. Argh. French bureacracy needs some process re-engineering...we landed in Paris Charles De Gaulle airport at 10:40 AM and it was 5:40 PM before we walked away from cargo area 5 with our beloved cats.
To kick things off, the highly skilled associates at the French cargo area informed us that our cats were not on our flight. No live animals appeared on the cargo manifest they had received from Continental. Hearts pounding, Rebecca and I looked at each other and wondered where in the world our cats might be. Are they back in Houston on the tarmac? Are they in Tokyo or possibly stuck in quarantine in London? A second check revealed that a separate manifest for live animals. Perhaps this was their first experience with live animals...very likely.
We took our new papers from first office (#1) to the customs office on the 2nd floor. "Veternaire" was written on our new papers and we were sent back to office #1. After finishing his enjoyment of an apple and flirtation with the office femmes, a new face in office #1 made a slow walk to see if we needed any help. He looked at the papers and said, "OK - wait 1/2 hour" and pointed to another area of the building. Time: 1:20 PM.
The half hour turned into an hour, then two then...we asked for an update. "Just wait" we were told. So we waited and waited....and at 4:30 PM, a man walked into the office with some papers that appeared to be those of Roxy and Yum Yum. Finally, we received the OK to go back to the customs office after the 'paperwork' was completed in the first office. Our friend in customs informed us that the vet only signed for 1 cat, not 2. We walked back to the first office and together, called the vet's office. (Of course, I'm not understanding a thing because very little English is spoken by any of the staff.) Time: 5:20 PM. Vet problem cleared up and 2 cats are approved. I'm still wondering why they had to see the vet when we had all of our European Union animal health papers in order. So, the documents were handed to another person so our cats would be retrieved. After waiting another 20 minutes, we had to ask when our cats would be brought out. Three people worked together in a confused way to find our papers & location of our cats. How in the world could they have lost our documents that took them over 5 hours to produce? Je ne sais pas.
Scared and curled into the corners of their cages, our cats emerged from the shipping freight cargo door. After dodging the forklifts, our cats were with us again. Their final challenge: jet lag. It is a bit hard to tell when cats have jet lag since they sleep all the time. However, their sleeping, eating, playing schedules were off enough for us to tell they had jet lag. It took about 3 days for them to get on the local schedule...we think. Thankfully, they are a-ok now.
