Countdown to the UK: 10 Days

It's ten days until we move.

Ten days.

TEN DAYS.

Am I freaked out? Yes, yes I am.

The kids have gone with their Dad to Disneyworld, which is rough because it's the ultimate family holiday cliche. How better to hammer in that there's a version of my kids' family that doesn't include me? That's always hard to think about.

Fortunately, I'm too busy to think about it. I always kind of figured that their father would take them on a trip before we left, and as recently as a few months ago, I pondered taking a trip of my own at the same time. A farewell tour, just for me...

Now that I'm at this point, I don't know how I ever thought I'd have the time. Breaking news: an international move isn't straightforward.

Obstacle 1: As we got closer to the move date, I had a lot of very mixed feelings regarding the kids' father and leaving him behind. When I say 'mixed', I mean a full spectrum of All The Feels Good And Bad. It got to the point where I just didn't want to see him or interact with him, so I told him not to help out with the move and getting the house ready for sale, even if that meant I would do a pretty crappy job of it. (I did.)

Obstacle 2: His employer is paying for our move (or at least everything but the cats), and they wouldn't talk to me directly because I'm not their employee; he is. So despite my feelings, I had to work with him to book the moving company, which brings us to...

Obstacle 3: Bureaucracy. I needed to get two quotes for the move and submit them to the employer who would pick one. As it turned out, they had very specific requirements for those quotes, but for some reason, I could only learn those requirements through trial and error. I started contacting moving companies in February and that kicked off this hideous game of telephone: Employer -> Kids' dad -> Me -> Moving companies... and back again... and forth again... and back... and forth. It was May before I finally got a decision on which company I could book.

Obstacle 4: Funnily enough, if you plan to move in June but can't book anything until May, fixing a date becomes a problem. The mover didn't have anything available until the 27th/28th June. Fine. I took that date and went to sort out flights.

Obstacle 5.1: The cats. When we moved to the US 13.5 years ago, we had the cats shipped in the cargo hold and they were very stressed. They're now elderly and I badly wanted to take them in the cabin on our return. It looked like Air France could do that. I called them up before we had a date and a gentleman told me that they could travel in cabin on the Dulles-Heathrow flight. Once we had a date, I called to get this confirmed and booked... they couldn't do it. After some frantic checking of other airlines, it appeared that the UK simply doesn't permit animals to enter the country in cabin. They have to be processed from the cargo hold.

Obstacle 5.2: Meanwhile, the employer was querying why we weren't taking a cheaper flight / route than Dulles-Heathrow. They weren't keen on spending a few thousand dollars extra on plane tickets just so we could travel on the same flight as our cats. The other problem was that a lot of pets travel in the summer as people finish their contracts and move. The flights that would be acceptable to the employer were already fully booked with animals. Eventually, I found space on a flight on the 23rd. This was days before our official move, but I booked it anyway.

Obstacle 6: The rest of the journey. The outcome of all that is that the children and I will be flying at the same time as the cats but not on the same plane. There's been a hell of a lot of coordination over how we all get to and from airports, and a lot of people are going to be very helpful, but honestly, it's still not totally clear how it's going to pan out and I don't want to talk about it and jinx it.

Obstacle 7: Transfer of residence. The trick to an international move is finding out what needs to be on my To-Do list. I had an idea of a lot of things, based on moving out here in the first place, and I got pretty good at googling the right questions or asking the right people... One thing I didn't know about until I booked the movers was that I needed something called a Transfer of Residence number. This wasn't a requirement for entering the US, but UK customs will demand it for the import of both our belongings and the cats. The moving company sent me the link to find the application, I filled it out and received an auto-response promising the result in 14 working days.

That was 15 working days ago.

Obstacle 8: Bureaucracy 2.0. So today I called the number on the auto-response email and got a recorded message saying the number had changed and please call this number instead. I called that number, fumbled my way through menu options that didn't quite sound right and got put through to a real live woman who was plainly used to getting people looking for ToR updates. She gave me a third number to call, telling me I wanted option 4. I followed this advice and was relieved to hear a recorded lady asking me to hold for a member of staff.

Three seconds later, Recorded Lady spoke again. "All of our staff are very busy right now. Perhaps you could try calling at a different time. Thank you for your call. Goodbye."

Somewhat appalled, I called back immediately, and got the same result. Half an hour later, still no change. An hour later. Two hours later, Recorded Lady finally said something else: "Our offices are now closed. We are open Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm."

If we convert that to my timezone, that means I have to call between 4am and noon tomorrow in the hopes of hitting a moment when all of their staff are not very busy.

Again.... it is ten days before we leave.

TEN %(#$@# DAYS.


One of the things I keep saying in conversation about this is: "The Move is going to happen. Whether this gets done or not, The Move will happen."

That's what an international move is. It's its own entity and it's inevitable. As much as I might screw things up, we'll leave the US in ten days... hopefully with our cats and hopefully with the rest of our stuff following us in due course. But The Move is going to happen. I'm not sure if this is something I know or something I believe, but it's a source of confidence either way.

Ten more days....