Up Up and Away!
Just in case you were wondering...
We are here! We made it to Mexico! Whew! What a whirlwind.
As I sit here breathing a sigh of relief and finally getting a chance to relax, let me give you a little recap of how my last two weeks have been.
It all started with emptying out the rental. Making sure we separated everything into piles of keep, goodwill, trash, and store, we took a room at a time the last couple of weeks we were there and emptied it one by one. The last couple of days we cleaned each room, vacuumed them, and shut the door. We would move everything into the main living area and we just slowly put things in the different categories.
All in all it went well and took us a day and a half to load things up and clean the rental(with the help of some amazing friends). It was stressful and I had to give a lot away but it does feel great to only have our belongings able to fit in an 5 x 8 U-Haul. We ended up with 9 checked suitcases, 4 carry-ons, and 4 personal items for the plane.... annndd a cat.
Thus began out 5 hour drive to family which ended up being 7 hours 😅. We could only go about 55-60mph with the trailer in tow and Ollie(gato) was not happy where I initially put him. I thought he would enjoy a larger area to move around instead of being in the little carrier for the plane. Boy was I wrong.
He squished himself in the most uncomfortable place and was quite stressed. He ended up what I'm going to call "stress pooping" twice! Here we are sitting in the car trying to get out of the city and all of a sudden smelled a terrible smell enveloping the van. Yes... it was Ollie taking a dooky. So we had to find a place to pull over and get everything cleaned up. In the end I put him in the little carrier on my lap and opened the top of it and he was fine the rest of the way.
I have never traveled this far with a cat before and Ollie has never had this kind of an adventure either. It was all new to us.
Once we unloaded the trailer into a storage unit, we spent some time with family for a couple of days, and then it was time for the flight!
I don't know about you but I have never checked so many bags before. I prepaid for the 9 suitcases online. We got to the airport and the ladies checking us in were very helpful, albeit slow. Getting Ollie's info took a while. They asked for his health certificate and proof of vaccinations. We started loading up the 9 suitcases onto the scale and they all were exactly 50lbs except for one, which was 50.5 lbs. So I took out one item and BAM all the suitcases got checked! We bought this handheld scale below to weigh our suitcases beforehand.
*Please note, I may be compensated for any purchases made through my link
So check-in took a bit longer than anticipated and as we were going through security we heard our names being called over the intercom! Here we are trying to tote all this stuff through security, taking the cat out of the carrier and holding on to him for dear life for fear he would escape. They had to check the bag of litter I had brought so Hubby had to run ahead and let the counter know we were coming. I'm sitting here trying to stuff a 15 pound cat back in his carrier, make sure I have our passports, and fast-walking to the gate with my shoe untied and kid in tow. It was a sight I'm sure! United Airlines helped a lot though. Someone helped carry some luggage all the way to the plane, a kind gentleman switched seats with us so E and I could sit together, and we were off! The last ones on the plane but we made it!
One plane switch in Houston and another 2 hr flight later and we landed in Mexico. It was about 6pm and we had friends come pick us up in 2 cars just to fit the luggage. So much luggage! We are currently staying in a friend's Airbnb until we figure out where we will live. But that's it! That's our story of how we finally, after months of planning, made it to Mexico.
We are going to look at rentals today so look out for a future post on those to see what you can get here in beautiful Merida.
~Bee
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