It's official!

The last few days have been rather nerve racking! We must be crazy, or truly the best dog owners on the planet! Mango is one lucky dog… no pun intended! The protocol that one must follow to take your dog abroad is strict, and one false move could have you turning around at the airport and going home, or worst case scenario, flying all the way to your destination and being turned around and put right back on the plane. Yikes! Ok, let's not go there… We still haven't made it to Portugal! Thursday we took Mango to a local animal hospital where she was poked and prodded and thankfully deemed healthy enough to fly! The hard part was having the vet fill out the Canadian Food Inspection Agency 5 page bilingual animal health certificate. Don't get me wrong, she was a wonderful vet, but she had no experience with filling out these forms. Let's just say we were in there for over 2 hours, and came out with the completed papers in hand, and not feeling very confident. Went home, felt ill, barely ate, and went to bed where I tossed and turned all night worried that the papers would not be accepted and we would be sent back to the vet…. Which would not have been good. The entire Vet population of Halifax would be at a conference the next day… Go figure. Friday morning we began our drive to find out Mango's fate. Of course we had one hiccup in the commute, our trusty GPS "Jim" had us drive past the office where we found ourselves on a busy highway with no turn around in sight. Excellent. Damn it Jim! Anyways, we did make it to the office with minutes to spare. Fortunately the CFIA agent was not as scary as we (me) had imagined. There were some moments of silence when he would look to long at one page, and flip it over a few times as if something was missing or incorrect, but eventually he smiled at us and told us we were good to go! Bringing out the coveted stamp you see above. Woo hoo! Portugal here we come!

Here I am in amongst the rubble. Note the suitcase in the right hand corner and the one behind me. We never started out on this road trip with luggage, just the pink and black boxes you see around me. So we searched everywhere for cheap luggage. We now know that does not exist. We could have opted for a Walmart special, but we had little faith that it would make it through the flight. So we decided to give "Kijiji" a try, and found a lovely set of 2 suitcases and a small carry on bag. Good ole' "Ricardo of Beverly Hills"! It's not flash but when you have perfectly good luggage in your storage locker back home, it will do just fine! Also, note the dog kennel behind me. No we have not been travelling around the country with that in the back our car. This was just another expense we had to swallow for the love of Mango. Just so you know this is our 3rd kennel. First one we gave to a family member and you guessed it, the 2nd one is home safe and sound in the storage locker. Unfortunately we couldn't find one of those second hand! So here we are, pretty much ready to go. Today I took some time to give the inside of the T@b a good clean and organize it for our return in a few months. We actually miss the little trailer. It's been our home for the last 6 months, and a small part of us is excited at thought of the Canadian adventure that awaits us. Don't worry little T@b we will be back!