By car, the 4,300-kilometre journey from Watsonville, CA to Morriston, Ont. takes about 40 hours.

By plane, it takes about seven hours.

And if you’re a cat – well, we don’t know the exact travel time for that, but it’s less than four years.

BooBoo, a brown Tabby, disappeared from Watsonville in 2013.

Her owners searched for her for months, without success. Even though BooBoo had been microchipped, the trail grew cold.

Enter the Guelph Humane Society.

Earlier this month, they took in a stray cat that had been found south of the city, in the Morriston area. That cat had a microchip. That microchip revealed something completely unexpected – a registration address three time zones away.

“We were shocked when it led to a California owner,” says Melissa Stolz of the Humane Society.

They tried calling the number on the microchip. It was the right number, but BooBoo’s family saw the Canadian area code and assumed it was a telemarketer.

A few hours later, they discovered that they had a voicemail with an unthinkable message: BooBoo had been found.

“It was something that I never would have really expected,” says Ashley Aleman.

“We tried calling, but then we realized it was 10 (p.m.) your guys’ time – so we had to wait anxiously all the way until the next day, not knowing if she was deceased, if she was alive, what was going on.”

When Guelph and Watsonville finally connected, the Alemans learned that BooBoo was alive and well, particularly considering that nobody knew what she had been up to.

“She came in in great condition – no real problems at all. Somebody’s clearly been caring for her,” says Stolz.

So how did BooBoo end up making a journey that would have spanned, at an absolute minimum, eight provinces and states?

Stolz’s first thought was that her owners had moved to Canada and forgot to update the information on the microchip, but the phone call quickly disproved that theory.

It’s possible that that BooBoo was picked up in California by someone who ended up moving to Canada, or hitched a cross-country ride on a vehicle or two.

However she got to Canada, her trip home has already received more advance planning.

On Friday, Aleman’s mother will fly to Buffalo. Once there, she’ll meet an animal control officer who will hand her over.

Then she’ll take a return flight to California, where she’ll be reunited with her family – which now includes a second cat.

“We’re worried that she’s older and they’re just not going to get along, but we’re going to make it work,” Aleman says.

With reporting by Allison Tanner