Traveling With Pets: Why It Sounds Easy and It's Absolutely Anything But.

This is the story of two birds we loved beyond reason — Toshi and Ringo — and the impossible choice the world quietly forced us to make. If you're thinking about moving abroad with an animal, please read this before you decide.

I didn't see this story coming. I wish I had.

This is going to be one of the hardest things I've written on this blog, harder than the menopause piece, harder than anything about the medical detours. Because this one doesn't have a tidy ending. It has a real one. And if even one family reads this and makes a different decision because of it, then it was worth telling.

Bangkok, birthday, and the bird shop on every corner

We were living in Thailand. If you've never been, one of the first things you notice about Thai culture is how much they treasure birds. Songbirds in beautiful cages, conures riding around on people's shoulders, entire neighborhood blocks where every other storefront is a bird shop. You can't walk anywhere without hearing them. It's woven into daily life in a way that's hard to describe until you've been around it.

On my birthday — May 31st, 2025 — Mike and I walked past a shop and saw a six-week-old sun conure looking at us. That was it. We were done. We brought him home and named him Toshi.

And when I tell you Toshi became the most spoiled, velcro-loved bird on this planet, by every human in our house — including the kids — I am underselling it. He climbed on shoulders. He napped on chests. He learned the sound of the door and would start chattering before whoever it was even walked in. He picked his favorite people, then picked his second favorites. He was a personality.

A month later we thought Toshi needed a friend, and we brought home Ringo — a blue Indian ringneck, only about four weeks old, still tube-feeding. We hand-fed him for weeks. He became just as spoiled. They weren't pals yet — sun conures and ringnecks have to be socialized carefully — but we were working on it, slowly, day by day. Two birds. One house. A growing little flock inside a growing little family.

Then we decided to move from Thailand to Vietnam

Five months in, the plan changed and we needed to leave Thailand. Vietnam was next. And here's where the fairy tale ends and the paperwork begins.

Thailand is not just hard to move pets from. From what I've heard from other families, Thailand is hard to move any animal out of, even one you didn't get there. The permits, the timing, the offices — none of it is built for foreigners with a sun conure and a ringneck and a flight in two months. The permits to take our birds from a vet to the Department of Health alone were a hair-pulling project. Add CITES permits because both species are regulated under international wildlife trade rules. Add health checks. Add Bangkok trips, because nothing important happens anywhere else.

Let me put numbers to it:

• 2 months of boarding our birds at a vet while we sorted paperwork
• 4 health checks
• 5 permits
• 2 CITES permits
• 5 trips to Bangkok
• Hundreds of hours working with Thai government offices
• Two birds, packed into cat carriers, because that's what fit the rules
• And after all of that — we still had to beg an airline to take us

That last part was the actual miracle. The airline saying yes is the thing that should make every American moving abroad with a pet stop and breathe. We're used to a culture where if a process exists, it has a price and a timeline and you can pay it and do it. Most of the rest of the world doesn't operate like that. In a lot of Asia in particular, if you can imagine the most convoluted way for a thing to get done, that is generally the way it gets done. Not because anyone's being difficult — that's just the system. You learn to bow to it.

Vietnam itself, on the way in? Easy. They just wanted a negative bird flu test. After two months of Thai paperwork hell, Vietnam's entry felt like a warm hug.

And then they bloomed

Once we were settled in Vietnam, our birds thrived. Toshi and Ringo grew up. They learned to fly. They learned to talk. They became the center of the family in a way I genuinely didn't see coming — not just for me and Mike, but for Savannah, for Liam, for Kadyn, for Hadley. The grandkids loved them like siblings. They had a huge indoor/outdoor aviary that was basically a small jungle, big sleeping cages at night, and the run of us all the rest of the time.

For about a year, the story of Toshi and Ringo looked exactly like the Instagram fantasy. Two beautiful birds, in a tropical country, living their best life with a family that adored them. We could have stopped here and called the whole thing a win.

Then my health started getting worse. And we decided we had to leave Vietnam.

Vietnam to Albania — and a war that changed everything

Vietnam, surprisingly, wasn't the hardest country to leave with the birds. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't impossible.

The problem was everywhere between Vietnam and Albania.

Albania isn't in the EU, which on paper should have made things simpler. But there are no clean routes from Southeast Asia to the Balkans that don't pass through European airspace and European hubs. And the war in the Middle East — still ongoing as I write this on May 22nd, 2026 — has rerouted, restricted, and quadrupled the cost of every flight in that part of the world. For humans. For pets. For everything.

For our birds, this is what the move actually meant:

• Routing them through and into the EU, which triggers full EU pet import rules
• Birds are on the CITES list, which means additional wildlife trade permits at multiple points
• Roughly 5 months of timeline — between quarantines, available routing, and EU-mandated quarantine periods just to exit the EU again into Albania
• Roughly $10,000 USD for the move itself, before you add anything that goes wrong
• And it all had to happen while my health was getting worse and our own airfare to get out was tripling by the day, when we could even find a flight

If we'd been moving from Thailand back to Thailand, or somewhere with a Thai-like bird culture, I would have been heartbroken but at peace finding them a great home. Thais cherish their birds. You can hand a sun conure to the right Thai family and know that bird will be loved like a child for the rest of its life.

Vietnam isn't that. I want to be honest about it. Vietnam's pet stores are lacking. The bird shops there are, frankly, horrible. People keep songbirds in tiny cages and that's mostly it — exotic parrots aren't really part of the culture. Toshi and Ringo had been raised in a household where being caged during the day was completely foreign to them. They had jungle and people and freedom. A standard Vietnamese cage was going to break them.

So we were trapped in the worst version of the math problem: we couldn't take them, we couldn't leave them just anywhere, and the clock was running on my health.

The man who free-flew his birds

I posted in some of the local Facebook groups. I don't know what I was hoping for. A miracle, probably. A unicorn.

And then — and I still can't quite believe this part — we found one. A Vietnamese man who free-flight trains his birds, including sun conures. He didn't keep his birds caged during the day. He let them fly. He understood them. The other birds in his home were happy, healthy, and clearly loved. When we met him, I knew within ten minutes that this was the closest thing to us that Toshi and Ringo were going to find in Vietnam.

And every single part of handing them over shattered our hearts.

I don't have a way to dress that up. The kids cried. Mike cried. I cried. Savannah cried. We had been a family of eight — six humans, two birds — and we were leaving as six. We knew we were making the only choice we could make. And it still wrecked us.

Our lifestyle — traveling, living abroad the way we do, moving when we have to move — is just not conducive to pet ownership. Not the kind we want to give. Not for animals like ours, who needed a real home, real space, real continuity. The honest answer is that the way we live and the responsibility of those birds had become incompatible, and pretending otherwise would have hurt them, not us.

My mom, TT, and an $8,800 dog flight

I want to share one more piece of this story, because it matters.

My mom is 74. She has a small dog named TT, five years old, who flew with her from the U.S. straight to Vietnam — which was, by international pet-travel standards, an "easy" move. American to Vietnam wasn't bad. We made it look almost reasonable.

Now my mom is moving to Albania to be with us. And TT?

TT's move from Vietnam to Albania is costing my mom $8,800 USD. Months of boarding. Routing through the EU. Quarantine on the European side. The entire CITES-and-customs labyrinth that exists for any animal crossing those borders right now. $8,800.

And here's the thing — my mom can't leave TT behind. Shouldn't leave TT behind. She's 74. TT is her constant. There was no version of this move where she went without that dog. So she's paying it. And as I'm writing this, TT is at a wonderful boarder in Vietnam living her best dog life — open-range, daily photos coming in, spoiled rotten — and she'll get to Albania when she gets to Albania. I'll do an update post when she lands.

But $8,800 to fly one small dog across the world during a war is absurd. It's the world we live in right now, in 2026, and anyone moving with a pet needs to know that the number on the brochure is not the real number.

So here's what we'd tell anyone thinking about this

This is the part where I'm going to be very direct, because I love you and I don't want this to happen to you the way it happened to us.

Toshi and Ringo, wherever you are

I think about them every day. The way Toshi would nap with his head tucked into Mike's neck. The way Ringo learned to say his own name. The way the grandkids would come downstairs in the morning and both birds would absolutely lose their minds with happiness.

We didn't fail them. I have to keep telling myself that, because the grief still ambushes me at random hours. We loved them more than we loved the convenience of keeping them. And when the world made it impossible, we chose the version where they got a real life with a real person who understood them — not a cage in a moving truck or a quarantine room in a country we couldn't even pronounce.

If you're thinking about moving abroad and you have a pet — or worse, if you're thinking about acquiring one while you're already abroad — I am begging you to read this story twice. The fantasy is one photo. The reality is months of work, sometimes thousands of dollars, and sometimes a goodbye nobody warned you about.

Choose with your eyes open. And then, only then — choose everywhere.