Ireland or Bust: The Cultivation of a Moving Plan
It's time for the next instalment of this series! Over the past few months, I've been drafting this part of the story, and it's been more emotional than I expected. Therefore, I greatly appreciate your patience as I've written and rewritten this blog post.
In my last post, we left off in October 2025—the day my Foreign Birth Registration (FBR) certificate arrived in the mail. In case you missed that part of the story or just need a refresher, you can read "The Journey of Tracing my Roots" here. I'm sure by now you're very eager to dive back into the story. So, in this third instalment I’d like to share the preparations that took place before my family and I actually moved to the Emerald Isle.
Figuring out the logistics
To begin this part of the story, we must first return to March 2024. It was during that time that I had heard back from my dad—saying that he would help me with my FBR application, by supplying the documentation pertaining to him, which I needed to submit. My Wife, Cynthia, and I were overjoyed and filled with such excitement. Naturally, we started researching how people move from the USA to Ireland with their pets. At the time when we started planning our move, we had our dog, Finley (who is a large breed) and two blind cats, Charger and Dragon.
We knew that moving internationally would be challenging since we were bringing our fur babies. So our early research led us to find Cunard, a company who has been sailing the oceans for over 180 years. One of their vessels, the Queen Mary 2, makes transatlantic crossings from New York City to Southhampton a few times a year. This route wouldn’t get us exactly where we needed to go, but it would get us close. We figured that we could sort out the particulars of getting from Southhampton, England to Dublin, Ireland at a later date.
One of the unique things about Cunard is that passengers can travel with their pets on board. The number of pets is of course limited to the kennel space they have available, but it was a way we could actually travel with Finley, Charger, and Dragon the entire journey. Because of the limited space on board, bookings have to be made far in advance, and even then there is a waiting list for kennel spots.
After doing research and speaking with Cunard representatives—asking them tons of questions—Cynthia and I decided to book our voyage with a refundable deposit. Our ship wasn’t scheduled to set sail until January 2026 (22 months later)! Did we feel just a teeny bit nuts for putting a deposit on transportation even before I had submitted my FBR application? Yes, a little bit. However, we knew that if we wanted to get our fuzzy kids moved with us, we had to get them on the waiting list as soon as possible. Plus we had peace of mind knowing that if our plans changed, we could adjust our sailing dates or cancel our reservation all the way up until September 2025.
Our plans did indeed change over the course of those 22 months. We added two more members to our family in the Summer of 2024: a bonded pair of female cats, Fae and Coraline. We also discovered through additional research that getting from Southhampton to Dublin was logistically complicated, especially with three adults (me, Cynthia, and our best friend who was going to help us move) plus five animals! This crazy situation got us doing lots more thinking outside of the box.
We looked into ways for pets to fly in the cabin of a commercial aircraft. Unfortunately, not as many airlines in the USA allow dogs to travel onboard, since the COVID-19 pandemic. We kept running into a “no pet policy” or that non-service animals could only travel in the cargo area of the plane. We couldn’t even imagine putting any of our fur babies in the dark underbelly of a plane shoved in with the luggage. It felt like a terrible and unnecessary ordeal to put them through.
Then we started researching companies who specialise in moving pets abroad. These initially sounded like a better option, as our pets would be able to have people check on them periodically throughout their flight. However, this option still made us feel nervous, because we couldn’t be on the same flight as our fur babies. Additionally, we kept reading horror stories of companies sending pets on the wrong freight plane, which resulted in these sweet animals being separated from their humans for days!
Just when it seemed like flying wouldn’t be an option for us and our family, we discovered a private jet company whose entire business model is centred around flying pets with their people in the cabin of a chartered plane. As luck would have it, one of the few routes they offered was from New Jersey to Dublin. After reading rave reviews and watching many YouTube videos of people who have traveled on K9 Jets, we felt relieved that we had finally found a safe way to fly all together as a family.
The only barrier that remained was the cost of the flight. Since the planes are small, weight is the biggest factor in determining how full a K9 Jets flight can be. For our group, we would need to purchase three seats, which came to an estimated total of $24,000 (~€20,630)! If your jaw just hit the floor, then your expression perfectly matches ours when we first saw that number. How in the wide world would we be able to save that much money?! Well, spoiler alert: we didn’t. We have never been rich, financially speaking. So we knew we had to get even more creative with our moving plans.
It was around this time that we started brainstorming a hybrid approach to our move. We still had our reservation (with refundable deposit) with Cunard. We played out different scenarios of traveling on Cunard versus K9 Jets versus a commercial airline that allowed cats in the cabin. I won’t go through every iteration of this complicated part of our moving preparations. Just imagine one of those scenes in a movie where a cork board is covered in photos, clippings from newspapers, and tacked strips of red yarn creating lines across a collage of clues. That pretty well depicts how our brains felt when we were figuring everything out.
Eventually, we determined that Cunard wasn’t going to work for us. Getting from Southhampton to Dublin was going to be too complicated and quite expensive after all the costs were added up. So we canceled our transatlantic crossing ahead of the deadline and received our full deposit back, which then got invested right back into our moving budget. You may be wondering, “So how did you get to Ireland?” I’ll be sharing all the details of our actual move in the next instalment of this series, so stay tuned.
Letting go of stuff and making sacrifices
With our way of getting to Ireland figured out, we felt one step closer. Another big part of our preparations involved deciding on what belongings we would keep and which ones we would get rid of before our move. On this point, I have a slightly embarrassing confession to make. For most of my life I’ve really struggled to let go of items, even when they were no longer serving a purpose in my life. The anxiety of letting an item go and worrying that it might end up in a landfill was so overwhelming for me. Thus, I held onto items in order to avoid these uncomfortable feelings. As a result, my home became a warehouse of sorts with an organised hoard.
Over the years I would occasionally have motivation to get rid of a chunk of things, usually when moving to a new place. But reducing my belongings was only one part of the solution. The other part was breaking the habit of acquiring things without intention or mindfulness. I completed a lot of focused therapy sessions on my hoarding tendencies in 2022-2023, and it helped me tremendously. My progress was slow in the beginning. I plateaued as time went on, and I even had a few minor setbacks during especially stressful periods (i.e. getting laid off, surviving a hurricane, etc.).
With our moving plans set into motion in 2024, I knew I’d have to dig really deep and purge more than I ever had before. I began with easy categories, mostly clothing and items that I knew we couldn’t bring to Ireland, like kitchen appliances that wouldn’t work there. Getting cash for our garments from consignment shops became a sort of game. I will be honest though that I got rid of such a tiny percentage of things in 2024, but it was a start at least.
By 2025, Cynthia and I started selling gently used items on Facebook Marketplace, which became a part-time job. By summertime, I knew that I had to start letting go of items in the more difficult categories, like my books or sentimental items that were too big or heavy to transport. For tackling my book collection, I started with ones that I knew I could easily borrow from the library or could eventually get new copies of in the future. I sold as many books as I could through local shops in Asheville, and I donated the rest to the Buncombe County Libraries. It felt really good to know that fellow bookworms would eventually take home books that I had once read and cared for.
By the Autumn of 2025, we had gotten rid of a decent amount of our belongings, but we still had way too much left. There was no way we could take it all to Ireland. So we participated in a community yard sale the day after I received my FBR certificate, and we sold about two car-full’s worth of stuff! It turned out to be a fun and exhausting day. It felt so good to have gotten rid of so much and make a bit of cash too. Plus we received so many kind words of congratulations regarding our international move from people who visited our booth.
We continued to sell, donate, recycle, and responsibly dispose of items from October 2025 right up until the day we moved to Ireland in January 2026. It was such an all-consuming part of our preparations. When I step back and consider that I went through 39 years worth of my belongings (not including Cynthia's personal items), I’m really astounded by and proud of how much I released. Were there lots of tears? Oh yes! There were so many things that Cynthia and I sacrificed and grieved. When the preparations felt especially hard, I just kept reminding myself that the most important thing was to get our family moved safely to Ireland. Every item that I chose to get rid of made our move even more possible.
Readying our fur babies and saying goodbye
Throughout our planning and preparations, we made certain that all five of our feline and canine kids would have everything they needed to legally make the international move with us. We knew that as animals they would have to be up-to-date on their vaccinations; they would likely have to go through a period of quarantine; and they would need certified documents. Moving with our pets was probably the most complicated aspect of our preparations. I have to give all the credit to Cynthia for the hours of research, phone calls, and virtual meetings she sat through to ensure that we had everything in order for our fur babies. It was a massive undertaking with a lot of details to organise. Thank you, my Love!
We were also extremely fortunate that our veterinary clinic already had a doctor who was USDA certified, which meant that he could complete all the required pre-move exams, deworming treatments, and paperwork. This was such a critical part of our moving preparations, and we couldn’t have done it without the incredible support of the team at the Animal Hospital of North Asheville. I want to give a special shoutout and moment of gratitude to Dr. Lauer, Alexis, Dr. Loveless, and Olivia for going above and beyond in caring for our little family. Y’all are simply amazing! We’re so grateful for every bit of guidance, care, and support you gave us.
Throughout our moving preparations—beginning in early 2024 all the way into 2026— life threw a lot of unexpected things our way. Sadly in November 2024, we had to say goodbye to our sweet boy, Dragon. His health had been declining, and he was at a point that our medical interventions for easing his pain and symptoms were no longer improving his quality of life. It was an incredibly heartbreaking time for our family, and it was one of the most difficult decisions Cynthia and I have had to make. We knew though that by letting Dragon go peacefully through humane euthanasia, it was the kindest thing we could do for him at the end of his life.
On Dragon’s final day, Asheville experienced its first snowfall of the season. As a young cat, Dragon loved exploring the snow, and his last day was no exception. I held him wrapped in a blanket and took him outside to experience the falling snowflakes. It was the first time in a long time that we saw a glimpse of his old sparkle. Eventually, he wanted to get closer to the snow that was beginning to gather on the ground. I obliged; Cynthia and I watched him tiptoe in the freshly fallen snow with tears in our eyes. That snow felt like a beautiful farewell gift from the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I’ll never forget it.
Later that evening, we took Dragon and his brother, Charger, to the vet clinic. Since Dragon and Charger were littermates and both blind from an early age, they were a bonded pair. Cynthia and I wanted to make sure that Charger could be present for Dragon's passing, so that he would understand and be able to grieve as well. Once we were all settled into the private bereavement room, by our request, every member of staff came to wish Dragon well on his journey of crossing the rainbow bridge. Dragon was such a charmer, and he was one of the favourites at the clinic.
It was so comforting to witness just how beloved our little tuxedo gentleman was by all. Even amidst the tears and heartbreak, we felt so held and supported. Dragon passed away peacefully cradled in mine and Cynthia's arms. He lived a wondrous life of 11 years. Spending forever with Mr. Dragon still wouldn’t have been long enough, and we miss him every day. Knowing that we ended his suffering—which would have only progressed—helps to ease our heartache just a little.
Moving forward even though it hurt
It's difficult to know how to conclude this part of the story. Perhaps I don’t need to tie it up prettily with a bow. I can simply share the truth of what we went through, the sacrifices and the heartbreak. It’s just as much a part of the story as the happy, elated moments. Thank you so much for reading this far. If you would like to see this part of my story in a visual medium, please visit my YouTube channel to watch the video I created. Until next time…🪴
Cover image taken in Asheville, North Carolina during the Spring of 2025.
