Day 41 - Getting Dog Shots & Packing

After reading all the forum posts, official websites and some not so official we are finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to our dogs.

Here are some things that we learned so far.

1 - Fly Pets As Luggage - Try to get your dogs put in as luggage. Delta and other airlines will do this flying to Costa Rica. United will not, they may you check them as Cargo. Avoid Cargo at all costs because it will cost you. You will be forced to hire a pet broker on the Costa Rican side and some of the bids I got were outrageous to the point of being taken advantage of.

I say all this because we had to two large dogs 33lbs and 66 lbs that we wanted to take with us. Getting a pet broker to even return your email is an act of God and those who did were outrageously priced. 

So try to fly your pets as luggage anyway possible.

2 - Getting Your Pets Their Shots and Paperwork Together - From what we have read, we need to make sure we had the dog shots 30 days prior to us leaving. BUT you need to get a health certificate and your APHIS Form 7001 ten days before you arrive.

Do some shopping around on this. We had one vet that wanted to charge us $125 just for the APHIS Form 7001 form. That did not include the health check and they insisted on giving any shots and such.

Needless today this vet was price gouging or really did not want to do the work.

We found another vet that would do if for $54.00 per dog, which was a lot more reasonable. 

3 - 11 Years of Stuff  - Where to Sell - After living in our home for 11 years, we have a lot of junk. In fact we are really trying not to take much with us. We have been selling a lot of things and it has helped with the cost of the move.

If you are a  Facebook user, look for "online garage sale" page for your area. This is a great place to place things for sale.

There is also the standard Craig's List that has been productive as well.

But a good place to post as well is Meetup.com. You need to register for this site, but it is a great place to find like minded people.

SO if you have a lot of things that are specific to a certain hobby or lifestyle, this is a great place to put your stuff for sale.

EXAMPLE - We are "Preppers." We have a lot of survival food, camping stuff, and other survival gear. We were able to let a prepper group we found on Meet Up know that we had stuff for sale and we were able to sell a lot of our specialized things and get a good price too.  

So in working all these different places, we have been pretty successful in selling a lot of things that we did not want take with us, nor just give away either.

What our plan is to sell as much as we can and then if all else fails, we can have Goodwill or Salvation Army come pick stuff up and they will come load it up and haul it away.