Help us bring our furbabies home!

We (J., USA, and N., Netherlands) have been in a long-distance relationship for 8.5 years.

Until now, we have not been able to build up a life together in the same place because J. was the sole and full-time caregiver to an elderly parent. When his mother passed away some time ago, we started making plans for J. to make the move to the Netherlands to join N. permanently. We were saving money and gathering information, knowing that this would take time because there’s a lot of paperwork involved. We wanted to prepare the move thoroughly, especially since J. would be bringing our three cats with him.

About a month ago, we were suddenly faced with the information that J. would be losing the parental home he’d lived in with his mom to take care of her and would become homeless because of that. We were able to buy him some time by negotiating a definitive departure date, which meant we had to buy him a plane ticket for November.

This meant all of our preparations that we’d been planning on doing thoroughly were all of a sudden something we had to do within a span of weeks. This was extremely stressful and we weren’t sure we would be able to pull it off.

Logistically especially arranging travel for the cats was the most complicated issue. For the longest time we were afraid we might only be able to make it work for two of them. With J’s travel date only a week away we finally managed to lock in arrangements for our third cat as well. Although that’s a tremendous relief, we’ve run into a lot of expenses that we were not counting on having for quite a few months yet. Having to expedite our plans has put us in a really tight place. Vaccinations, health checks, travel crates, transportation to the airport, pet friendly hotel at the airport (J. will have to drive to a different state to fly out of because there weren't any options to take the cats from a closer airport), the travel fare itself… This has been quickly draining the funds we’d been setting aside in preparation for our plans. We could really use some help in bringing our furbabies home and finally having our family in one place!