This is everything between here and a calm arrival. The big one's settled: Rio and Rye fly in the cabin with us as service dogs, so the work now is having their training, tasks, and documents ready — plus the travel plan itself.

From there you close the decision gates, keep the dogs' health paperwork on its rabies-and-tapeworm schedule, and lock the visa and a pet-friendly place to land in Loughborough.

Everything you don't have to decide right now, but want close. The timeline counts down the dates you can't miss, and your notes and documents hold the decisions you've made and the files you're collecting.

When you want to sanity-check a plan, field notes are what other expats learned the hard way, and the sources are the official GOV.UK and USDA pages to trust before you pay for anything.

Rio and Rye fly in the cabin with us as trained service dogs — that's the plan, not cargo. What makes that work isn't luck; it's being ready: knowing their tasks, having their training on record, carrying the right documents, and having a clear story for any airline desk or border officer.

The health rules don't change — microchip, rabies and tapeworm timing still live in Rio + Rye. This page is everything specific to flying them as service dogs.

The decision's made: Rio and Rye fly in the cabin with us as service dogs. Everything that matters for that lives on the Service dogs page. The other routes stay here for reference — we're not taking them, but it's worth knowing the landscape.

For the record: direct cargo is the conventional path, a relocation specialist runs the paperwork at a premium, EU staging trades control for moving parts, a charter is gentle and pricey, and you can always delay until housing locks. Compare them below; our pick is already set in the travel plan.

You're entering on the Student route as a PhD researcher, and Stella joins as your dependant — which means a CAS, the funds you have to show, and evidence the relationship is real.

The real bottleneck on arrival usually isn't the visa, though — it's finding a pet-friendly rental in Loughborough that will take Rio and Rye in writing. Both sides are below.

From here to September it goes in five beats. Around 120 days out you open the route market — vet consults, quotes, confirm chips and rabies. At 90 days you stack Stella's visa evidence and start the pet-friendly housing hunt. At 45 days you choose the route, buy crates, and book the vet windows.

The final 10 days are the certificate sprint, and the last 3 are the tapeworm lock, timed to the exact arrival hour. The dated milestones below shift automatically with your move date.

The shared memory — airline calls, vet questions, shipper quotes, housing leads, and the decisions you want future-you to remember. Anything you capture from the home screen lands here too. Drop certificate PDFs and quotes in the file zone so everything's in one place.

Not official, but gold for what the government pages won't tell you: where people got tripped up, which assumptions cost them, and the exact questions to ask carriers and vets. The pattern is boringly consistent — cargo or an EU stage, obsessive paperwork, and no fantasies about pet-friendly passenger flights.

The threads are below; verify anything that matters against Sources.

Before you book, apply, or pay, check it against the canonical page — not a forum, not a vibe. GOV.UK owns the pet-entry sequence and the visa rules, USDA / APHIS owns the U.S. export side, and Loughborough owns CAS and accommodation. The full set is below.