An Odyssey of a Cat (and her owners): Episode 4

Sunday was our day of departure for Japan. We had the cat's paperwork in order, all our bags were packed. We would go to the airport around 9am.

Our friend who took care of Coco had two other cats, with whom Coco was not quite comfortable. She had her hiding spots in the house to be away from these cats.

That morning, she sensed something was a bit odd, and decided to take refuge in one of those spots. I said "she'll come out in time. It's still early," but my partner, who always gets nervous before having to get Coco in the carrier, was not convinced. We called her, wooed her, cajoled her, to no avail. We decided to be a little more coercive and started to poke around her. She came out once, and before we could get hold of her, ran back into the maze. "She's coming out. She can't stay there forever," I said, in an excessively light tone.

We were getting nervous again. The clock was ticking, and she did not make a sound. We had no idea where she was in the pile of things. My partner asked if I was ready to go home without Coco or we weren't going to make it on the plane.

After all we had done on Friday, she does this to us?

We called the airline to see if we could make a last minute change to our tickets.

"Sir, you can't change the tickets at this moment."

We found out that to change the reservation, we would have to pay $7,000 for two. I was now madly trying to chase Coco out of the pile of stuff. A few more minutes and we'd lose our flight.

We decided to dismantle the pile. One by one, we moved pieces of furniture that probably were there untouched for years. The cat did not appear in time, and...

We missed our flight. We missed our flight to Japan, without having been able to rebook the next one. I had never missed a flight before, and it felt awful.

Or...I panicked. I did not understand why I had to go through this. Everything was going well until Friday. We were on the right track, we just had to get the cat out of the maze and onto the carrier. We should have kept her in the carrier from the night before, when she came out to eat. We should've, we should've...

We missed our flight. And I did not want to think about what our options might have been. Seven thousand dollars.

Then it hit me. Mileage. We forget about changing our tickets, we can rebook our return flights with my mileage. We called the airline again, and found out the same flight the next day was available to be purchased with miles. Five minutes on the phone, holding our breath, and we booked 2 persons + a cat to Tokyo, $10 for humans, $120 for the cat.


The two humans and the cat lived in Tokyo happily ever after...well, after a 4-hour delay.