Emily the stowaway cat is back -- after flying home in the lap of luxury.
The curious cat from Wisconsin who disappeared two months ago and wound up traveling to France in a cargo container touched down at the Milwaukee airport on Thursday, greeted by her family and a horde of reporters.
"She'll be held onto a lot all the way home. And then when we get home, too, she'll be cuddled a lot," owner Donny McElhiney said.
Her sumptuous return in business class on a trans-Atlantic Continental Airlines flight was a sharp departure from her trip the other way, when she arrived thin and thirsty but still alive. On her flight home, Emily passed up a menu of peppered salmon filet and "opted for her French cat food" and some water, airline spokeswoman Courtney Wilcox said.
"She seems a little calmer than she was before, just a little quieter, a little, maybe, wiser," Lesley McElhiney said.
A Continental cargo agent carried Emily from the plane and handed her over to the McElhineys' 9-year-old son, Nick Herndon. Emily meowed and pawed at reporters' microphones as the family answered the media's questions.
The airline offered to fly the cat home from Paris after her tale spread around the world and she cleared a one-month quarantine.
"This was such a marvelous story, that we wanted to add something to it," Continental spokesman Philippe Fleury said at Charles de Gaulle airport.
A full-fare ticket for Emily's seat would normally cost about US$6,000. The airline provided two company escorts for the cat.
Emily vanished from her home in Appleton, Wisconsin, in late September. She apparently wandered into a nearby paper company's distribution center and crawled into a container of paper bales.
The container went by truck to Chicago and by ship to Belgium before the cat was found Oct. 24 at Raflatac, a laminating company in Nancy, France.
Workers at Raflatac used her tags to phone her veterinarian in Wisconsin, and the vet called her owners.
Emily's escort across the ocean, Newark-based Continental employee George Chiladze, said he was thrilled to take Emily home.
"I will make somebody really happy to deliver this poor traveler back home," he said.
Continental cargo agent Gaylia McLeod accompanied the cat aboard a 50-seat plane on the last leg of the trip to Milwaukee.
"I know it's close to the holidays," a tearful McLeod said. "I'm happy to be a part of reuniting Emily with her family."
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