Ground dog day, part 2

KLM saves the day

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on my blog on July 29, 2022. It has been imported here and updated.

So there we were: My husband in Berlin, myself in Atlanta. Our two kids were in a hotel with my mom, the dogs in crates at our house, and I was running around getting last-minute items in boxes, going to the house closing, selling our car, cleaning up after the movers left, and hoping that we would be able to leave on Friday as scheduled.

Rosie, our amazing travel coordinator at Starwood Animal Transport, managed to pull through a miracle and book the dogs on another cargo flight, that Thursday night, on KLM. The dogs would fly into Amsterdam, not Frankfurt. But we could still fly on Friday as planned.

My husband re-scheduled his time off from work, then booked a train ticket to Amsterdam. Frankfurt is a six-hour drive from Berlin, but Amsterdam is over seven and a half hours.

Driving the dogs in one day from Frankfurt would have been difficult but doable, but seven-to-eig…