It’s the sort of story that’s been made into multiple movies: A beloved family pet goes missing and is presumed lost forever, only to show up alive and well years later.

But it was no Disney picnic for Dizzy, a calico cat who went missing from Coupeville two years ago, and turned up on the streets of Port Townsend last month.

Jenny Haynes, shelter manager for the Humane Society of Jefferson County, Washington, reported that Dizzy was brought to her Feb. 28.

“She’d been sighted outside an uptown Port Townsend dentist’s office for close to a month,” Haynes said. “She was finally brought in when someone saw her huddled in a pile of leaves in the snow.”

Per the shelter’s standard procedure, the first thing they did was scan the cat for a microchip.

“We called the chip’s company, Avid, but their phone lines were down for two days,” Haynes said.

When the shelter managed to get in touch with Avid, the company informed them that the cat had been chipped at a veterinary clinic in Hawaii more than seven years ago, but had no further details to give.

Haynes worried whether the shelter’s globe-spanning investigation might have reached its end when a call to the Hawaii clinic yielded a seven-year-old phone number for the cat’s owners.

“The owners never registered their address,” Haynes said. “The clinic even told us, ‘This phone number probably isn’t good anymore.’”

CLOSE TO THE FERRY

As it turned out, the Forschler family still had the same phone number, because they still lived at the same address in Coupeville, relatively close to the ferry docks, which Haynes suspects served as the gateway for their cat’s journey when she went missing two years ago.

“Cats do funny things,” Haynes said. “They might fall asleep in the back of a truck and wake up in a completely different town.”

Esther Forschler recalled how her family spent weeks searching for Dizzy, checking the area shelters, before finally giving up hope after a couple of months.

“Dizzy was an outdoor cat, but she usually came home,” Forschler said.

“When we first called the family, they were initially so shocked that it didn’t even click,” Haynes said. “It had been two years, after all. But then, once we started describing this calico cat, they were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Dizzy. We thought she was dead.’”

“I thought she might have been snatched up by an eagle in the woods near our house,” Forschler said.

PICKING UP DIZZY

The Forschlers were elated to pick up Dizzy March 3. Esther Forschler’s now-adult daughter snuggled with the cat at the shelter, and Forschler’s son, Sean, who had originally owned the cat, plans to come up from San Diego to see the family, and Dizzy, March 21.

Forschler reported that Dizzy has resumed her old habits of playing with the family’s German shepherds, as well as falling asleep in her husband’s lap while he watches TV, but she noted that some of Dizzy’s other habits have been forcibly curbed.

“We told her, ‘You are an indoor cat now,’” Forschler said.

Haynes urged pet owners not only to get their pets microchipped, but also to update their registries.

“Thank goodness the phone number that vet clinic in Hawaii had was still good,” Haynes said. “Otherwise, Dizzy never would have made her way home. Without updated information, that microchip is just a piece of metal.”

Conversely, Haynes also encouraged those who find lost or stray animals to check for a microchip.

“This cat was homeless for two years, because nobody thought to get her scanned,” Haynes said.