navygreen | Cute cat story.

I saw this article yesterday, and I thought it was such a cute story (but only because of the happy ending!). You can read it through the link, but I'm also posting it here for myself:

Stowaway Cat Makes It Back Home

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (Jan. 23) - Some kitty math: How many lives did little tabby Gracie Mae use up when she crawled into her owner's suitcase, went through an airport X-ray machine, got loaded onto a plane, thrown onto a baggage belt and mistakenly picked up by a stranger far from home?

Gracie Mae, a 10-month-old tabby, stowed away in her owner's suitcase for a plane trip from Florida to Texas. Once there, a stranger mistakenly picked up the suitcase and brought it home to find the cat inside.

"She's got to be at four or five now," Seth Levy said after his 10-month-old pet was returned Sunday night by a kind stranger who went home to Fort Worth, Texas, with the wrong bag and Gracie inside to boot.

The last time Levy's wife, Kelly, saw Gracie was before she took her husband to the airport. The 24-year-old went back to her house in Palm Beach Gardens late Friday to find the bottom step, where Gracie would usually be waiting, empty.

She tore the house apart looking for the cat, who had been spayed just days before. She and her dad took out bathroom tiles and part of a cabinet to check a crawl space and papered the neighborhood with "lost cat" signs.

Then she got a phone call.

"Hi, you're not going to believe this, but I am calling from Fort Worth, Texas, and I accidentally picked up your husband's luggage. And when I opened the luggage, a cat jumped out," Kelly Levy quoted the caller saying.

Rob Carter said he made it home with the suitcase before realizing it wasn't his — and there was a big surprise inside.

"I went to unpack and saw some of the clothes and saw it wasn't my suitcase," he said. "I was going to close it, and a kitten jumped out and ran under the bed. I screamed like a little girl."

Carter said that he eventually was able to get the cat to come out from under the bed.

"In the morning, I got close enough to see its collar and the phone number on it," he said. "So I called the number and got a hold of the crying wife of the traveler."

The tabby made the 1,300-mile trip home on an $80 plane ticket. Carter said he considered keeping the cat before he knew she had a home.

"We were going to name it Suitcase," he said.

Meanwhile, Kelly Levy, right, tore her house apart looking for Gracie Mae and plastered "lost cat" signs in her neighborhood before getting a call from the stranger, who was shocked when a cat jumped out of the suitcase. The cat then made the 1,300-mile trip home.

In December 2005, another cat made headlines when she was found in France two months after disappearing from her Wisconsin home. Emily apparently crawled inside a container at a nearby paper company and stayed inside while it was shipped to Chicago, then to Belgium and finally to France.

Workers at a laminating company in France found the cat and used her tags to contact her veterinarian, who called her owners. Emily then traveled home in style, riding in business class on a complimentary Continental Airlines flight.

Emily the cat looks out of her carrier as she waits for a connecting flight at Newark Liberty International Airport on her way home. "She seems a little calmer than she was before, just a little quieter, a little, maybe, wiser," her owner said at the time.