As anyone who suffers from anxiety knows, the first step in creating a solid plan is worrying (although I prefer the term “pre-problem-solving”). When moving to Amsterdam evolved from a dream to a reality, I quickly got to work. I gave notice at my office, allowing a full month between my last day at work and the date we’d touch down in Holland. Of all the things to worry about (so many), the topic that got top billing was what to do with my cats Milo and Ollie. If there was a fire and I could only save one other living thing, it would be Trenton but it’s a closer call than I think anyone is really comfortable with. I love my cats.

For a long time I considered the possibility that we would leave the cats in Kentucky. Not because I didn’t want them or that they would be inconvenient hassles, but maybe that’s what would be least traumatic for them. If the plane ride and Euro-apartment living would be too stressful, I would have to let them go. But the tricky (and wonderful) thing about pets is you can’t ask them their opinion. I mean you can, obviously, and I frequently do. I also create elaborate responses for them based on fantastical experiences they could never have. Like Ollie used to play bass guitar for the band Poison. Or Milo is a reincarnated 13 year old human boy and that’s why he likes to hang out in the bathroom when I take a shower.

The point is my cats couldn’t tell me if they wanted to move to Amsterdam. Even if their tiny brains could comprehend the idea, they lack the necessary cognitive ability to form and express an opinion. So I had to decide for them.

It was agonizing. What kind of selfish bougie white girl am I to consider paying a shit ton of money to fly two cats overseas to comfort me in my new apartment in Europe? For. Fucks. Sake.

But guys, my cats are the best and I think they love me too. I know the thing about how if you die your dog will cry at your side for days, starving and weeping, but your cat will start eating your eyeballs before your body cools, and I don’t care. My cats have my blessing to eat my eyeballs when I die. I’m that kind of selfish bougie white girl.

I had done the research and knew I didn’t want to fly them over in cargo. If we couldn’t find an airline that would let us carry on the cats as hand luggage, they would have to stay in the United States. Lots of airlines have restrictions about animals on flights for obvious reasons. Size and weight of the animal is a consideration. The breed, the age, the length of flight. I narrowed our options down to three airlines we could consider, and we finally settled on United, who would charge a fee—per cat—but would allow us to stow them under the seatbacks in front of us. Ludicrous.

I also visited the vet’s office and asked for advice. At that point I was already 99% sure I would be taking the cats with me, but I asked my sweet French Canadian veterinarian if it was really reasonable to take them on a plane, my anxiety boiling up and over unbidden in tears.

“No problem,” she said. “Take away food and water the night before, give them a small dose of an anti-anxiety drug before you leave, and they should be just fine. It will be a little stressful and they may need some time to adjust, but they should be able to handle the flight without incident.”

The internet forums offered mixed advice, mentioning horrors about frozen or boiled pets in cargo, popped eardrums incapable of handling the altitude changes. Even in possession of a bottle of a hundred cat-dose sized chunks of Xanax, I worried and worried and worried. It didn’t occur to me until weeks later that possibly the veterinarian had intentionally given me enough pill chunks to cover a few human-doses as well. I had cried in her exam room, for heavens sake.

The next step was how to transport them. Just the site of the old travel carriers used to be enough to send Milo into a panic, so I bought the new ones weeks in advance to try to get them acclimated. I tossed in treats to encourage them to explore. I lined the inside with fuzzy blankets and dirty laundry to get them to sleep there.

Eventually, Milo and Ollie were more or less comfortable with their new carriers and I felt like Cesar Milan. They started sleeping in them without any added encouragement from me, and even today, now that the carriers have been tainted with the memory of the flight, the cats still return to them occasionally for a safe snuggle.

I also had to get some travel documents together for the cats. It involved multiple trips to Frankfort where the Kentucky office of the USDA would certify that the cats were properly microchipped, and not serial killers or whatever.

Not until I was sitting in the waiting room at the USDA in Frankfort did I discover that there had been a mix up at the vet’s office back in Louisville. The cats had been vaccinated too close to their travel date. Operating on some faulty information, the vet mistimed the window and expedited the vaccine when they should have stalled.

Luckily, I was able to dig up some old but legitimate paperwork that showed they had actually received the correct vaccines within the correct window of time. The administrator at the USDA office immediately understood my dilemma and was totally onboard with my unorthodox and maybe possibly illegal solution of pretending one set of the vaccine certificates didn’t exist. She was the only kind and reasonable government employee I’ve ever met in Kentucky and within no time she had the form back to me with the stamp and signature I needed.

Per the doctor’s advice, I did a trial run with the Xanax for Milo and Ollie a few days before our flight. Ollie took his like a champ and chilled out on the couch for several hours. Milo ran around like a drunk frat boy, careening around corners and making howling noises as if to say “Guuuuys, this feels weeeeeeird!!!! I feel weird when I shake my head around like THIS!!!”

When the travel day arrived I decided to give Milo the Xanax anyway, despite his less than desirable reaction previously. I upped his dosage, hoping that an increased amount of Xanax would calm him down rather than make him an increased amount of wild and crazy.

Drugs notwithstanding, on the day of the move the two of them were visibly spooked. The house was weirdly empty with all our furniture donated or sold, and we had withheld food and water from them for several hours. Finally the time came to pack up for good and head to the airport. I forced some chunks of Xanax down their kitty throats and wrestled them into their once comforting travel bags. Trenton carried Ollie and I held Milo.

Despite having howled throughout the car ride to the airport, Milo finally quieted as we checked our luggage and were moving towards security. I don’t know whether the drug had started working or the airport scared him into a stupor, but it was just in time; now we had to say goodbye to our families and we couldn’t well all be crying.

After the last departing hug I tearfully approached the security belt and tried to find a sympathetic looking TSA employee. Unsurprisingly, I came up empty. The travel carriers had to go through the scanner, so I wrestled Milo out and luckily he was either too stoned or too scared to fight me. Trenton and I walked through the scanner holding the cats without incident, but just in case we had packed explosives in their anuses (I guess) we had to go over to the secondary screening to get our hands swabbed.

We juggled the cats one-armed and presented our hands for testing. I shot lethal glares at the agents but Trenton smiled calmly and thanked the TSA agent for his time. Trenton is the nice one.

Eventually we collected the carriers, and Milo and Ollie crawled quickly and gratefully back inside. We made our way to the gate and the cats settled into a quiet, if not totally restful, druggy state. Everything went shockingly smoothly from then on. We boarded with no problem and despite an uncomfortably long conversation with a cat lover during our layover in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, we made it easily through to the overnight flight to Amsterdam.

As the cabin lights came back on and the flight attendants began to serve breakfast, Milo decided he’d had enough, letting us know with sporadic yowls. He no longer found being petted through the built-in comfort flap of his carrier soothing, and tried to mash his head out of the opening to escape Jack Nicholson style. Surprisingly, no one around us seemed to mind his crying and thrashing. At most, I saw a few passengers asking each other if they heard a cat and a few sympathetic smiles.

An hour later we had landed, were out of the plane and ready for passport control. The border guards asked casually about the cats, but didn’t need to see any of the paperwork I’d painstakingly gathered.

Milo was getting pretty worked up at this point, and my nerves—stress compounded with sleep deprivation—were fried. Still, as we made our way out of the airport towards the taxis, I paused to snap a selfie in front of Schiphol airport. We had arrived.

The taxi took us to the studio apartment where we would be spending our first month, and I immediately unpacked my “Day Zero” supplies. Granola bars for Trenton and I, a bag of kibble for the cats, a litter box, and a tiny (travel?) bag of cat litter. As soon as I had the litter box prepared, Milo made a beeline and took the longest and loudest pee I’ve ever heard. Poor guy had been holding it for 12 hours.

After all the fuss, I’m grateful that I made the decision to bring my cats to Holland with me. They provide comfort and familiarity in a sometimes uncomfortable and always unfamiliar place. After discussing it at length, Milo and Ollie both tell me they’re happy to be here too.