Two Weeks And Two Days With Two Cats

Two weeks! I must have said it five or six times. Two weeks on the road with two cats in late June and early July driving from Massachusetts through the South visiting my parents in Blairsville, Georgia and her family in east Texas on our way to Albuquerque just sounded like a bad idea. Dovetailing with this plan, however, was a good solution to the timing problem involved with a two-week road trip: PODS - Portable On Demand Storage. We had two sixteen foot PODS delivered to our driveway. We loaded them ourselves over five days, then the trucks came as we were putting the lock on the first one and stuffing the last of the stuff into the second one. They were hauled to Albuquerque, where they would await our call for delivery. Perfect.

Carmen had flown to Albuquerque the day after her graduation from Andover Newton, made arrangements to rent a house during her internship there, and brought back a key to the place, as well as lots of pictures of it.

I'll spare you the details of our packing and moving stuff. Suffice it to say that our Freecycle account got a major workout, and still we left behind about three pickup truck loads of stuff for our landlord and their handy man to deal with. Carmen at the wheel, where she would stay for the entire trip, we pulled out of the driveway in Watertown at noon on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009, four years and two hours after Carmen had pulled into the driveway in Belmont, Mass. We stopped at a sub shop for lunch to take with us, and made for the Mass Pike, serenaded by two howling kitties. Two hours later we gassed up in Sturbridge, brought the cats up front to hang out with us, and headed out on Interstate 84. Territories were established. Yinny Yin Yin hung out between us on the shift console, and Remus J. Lupin dove down between my feet. This was pretty much the configuration for the entire seven days we would all be in the car together.

We barrelled ass through Connecticut and that ninety or so miles of New York on the way to Pennsylvania, narrowly missing New Jersey. Once in Pennsylvania I got on the phone to Choice Hotels and lined us up a pet friendly room at a Quality Inn near Scranton. This motel was nice enough, but the best part was the little hole-in-the-wall mom and pop Italian restaurant in the strip shopping center across the street. After an excellent dinner we went next door to the Dollar Store, where we found a Moses action figure for Carmen's altar, and a tiny hand broom and dust pan for our kitty litter clean up in the motel room. We (I) needed it!

We left pretty early Thursday morning, kitties in their carriers and snack bag handy. Carmen decided that today was a good day to start listening to the borrowed lecture CDs about Islam. I set up the new technology bought for the occasion, a device that transmits your separate device's output to a blank channel on your car radio. It works great until you near a city where that blank frequency isn't blank any more. I was drafted to take notes as well as to pause the lecture when discussion or clarification was called for, and to change discs and radio frequencies when necessary. This took us through Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia and into Virginia, where we stopped for gas and lunch. Time to put away the technology and bring the kitties out of exile. We parked in the shade, set up a litter box on my side, put down a small dish of water, and we went inside the fast food joint for gut bombs and rest room action.

When we returned we found the water spilled, litter on the floor and Miss Yinny Yin Yin camped out among the pedals on Carmen's side. I carefully opened the passenger door and grabbed ReLu, handed him to Carmen, removed the litter box to the special resting place on top of the carriers in back, got back in the car, took ReLu from Carmen, and he dove to his spot on the floor. Carmen opened her side, grabbed Yin, handed her to me, strapped herself in, and we were ready to go again.

We spent the night near Roanoke in a somewhat seedier motel next door to a Shoney's, where we ate for old times' sake - we hadn't seen a Shoney's in four years. The next morning we gassed up and got ready for the final push to Blairsville, Georgia. We did some more Islam lecture listening before gas and lunch in Greenville, South Carolina, then did the kitty shuffle to tide us through the afternoon. We were getting pretty durn good at the kitty shuffle by now, just in time to spend a week at the "cabin" in the mountains of north Georgia.

We exited Interstate 85 onto US 76, which winds through the mountains all the way to Blairsville and beyond. We didn't need gas yet. We drove on past Clemson, Seneca and Westminster, South Carolina. We entered Georgia. For some unknown reason, we didn't get gas in Clayton - maybe because we didn't know that the next thirty five miles would be a gas-guzzling roller coaster ride with no gas available until Hiawassee. We were white-knuckling it for the last ten, hoping not to run out in the wilderness. We didn't. We pulled into the first gas station in Hiawassee and filled 'er up. Plenty of gas to get to Blairsville.

It was a pleasant week with my parents. We talked and laughed, went grocery shopping and "cabin" carpet shopping, ate at some of North Georgia's finest restaurants, and watched the flying squirrels eat sunflower seeds from the squirrel-proof feeder in the dead of night. Fun stuff.

We left on the morning of the 4th of July. Our plan was to NOT be in Crosby, Texas on the 4th of July, and this plan accomplished that goal. We headed south, around the west side of Atlanta and on into Alabama on Interstate 85. Carmen was nervous about driving a ferrin Toyota with Massachusetts tags through the deep South, but the biggest excitement of the day was in southern Alabama, where a rock from a dump truck ahead of us bounced off the highway and cracked the windshield. Carmen's nervousness about this did not abate when we drove into a horrendous nasty thunderstorm in Mississippi. We felt as if we were back in Florida again, in tropical weather. We pulled into a motel near Biloxi, got a room and the four of us hunkered down to wait out the storm. First the cable TV went out, then the power went out, and we were stuck in the dark in the horrendous heat. But the best part: the bathroom ceiling was cracked and crumbled and looked as if it would fall in at any moment. This was not a restful stay, especially after the storm ended and the locals started up their fireworks.

July 5th was a better day. We plowed on through Mississippi and Louisiana, gassed up and had lunch at the Cracker Barrel near Lake Charles, then hung with the kitties and headed down the home stretch to Crosby, Texas.

We were issued a room with a faulty latch on one of the two doors, and a house full of peeps who were not at all accustomed to having cats around. Cat feeding time is a delicate arrangement involving two separate rooms and one of them quiet enough for our little blind girl to be calm enough to eat, while Remus cries and tries to get to her feeding place. The bathroom that was Remus Lupin's feeding station had three doors, one of them with the aforementioned latch (which I fixed very soon after our arrival) and the other two opened and left open randomly by the aforementioned peeps. There was a cage of birds in the living room which were made no less attractive to ReLu by moving them up to the loft. And the serenity factor was totally absent unless everyone was asleep. Even when all but one was asleep, that one, Carmen's sister, climbed up on a glass-topped coffee table and crashed through, leaving a horrendous gouge in her leg and blood everywhere. Our three days in Crosby were not as serene as the seven in Georgia. But we had some fun. We shopped at Walmart, Sandra and I went for hearing tests, and we got our windshield replaced. The Wednesday that was our last day in Crosby we had a cookout in the ninety some degree heat, and we ate inside in the air conditioning.

Thursday morning we packed the car back to its former state with one major exception: the back seat was left open for Carmen's thirteen year old niece Brittany to ride with us to Albuquerque. She was to help us unload the PODS and get a taste of life outside of the Crosby Circus. She had her text-friendly cell phone and her portable DVD player, so she was good to go. We wended out way through Texas on those long straight roads until we got to Interstate 45, then it was on through Dallas, with gas and lunch on the far side. Then on north on Interstate 35 in mounting traffic toward Oklahoma City.

I called my Choice Hotels connection again, and we figured out a pet friendly reservation in Oklahoma City, where it was now one hundred five degrees with as much humidity as you could ever want and then some. The guy gave me directions to the hotel, and in the thick of rush hour traffic, we found that the exit we were told to take was closed. We exited at our next opportunity. I called the hotel and asked for the address while Carmen was busy firing up the Garmin GPS. After another half hour of battling our way through traffic ans stiffling heat, we made it to the hotel. The pet friendly rooms were on the third floor.The air conditioner was simply not up to it. By 6:00 in the morning when we were packing up to leave, the room had almost cooled down. We got out of there as fast as we could.

The Garmin was now programmed with our address in Albuquerque. She guided us out of the hotel, to Interstate 35 south and onto Interstate 40 west. Then she said, "Drive four hundred thirty seven miles and exit right." Across western Oklahoma, across the Texas panhandle and into New Mexico we went. We tried to point out interesting stuff to Brittany, but she had never heard of Roger Miller or Historic Route 66. She was much more interested in texting her friends, "Whatcha doin?"

We were getting pretty hungry as we entered New Mexico. We all agreed that the Dairy Queen in Tucumcari, advertised on billboards for many miles, sounded like a good place to get some lunch. We took the exit and followed the signs, mouths-a-watering. We arrived at the place only to find hundreds of motorcycles parked in the lot and hundreds of unsavory-looking humans crowding the building. We moved on. The snack bag was getting mighty low, and it got lower. Horses headed for the barn is what we were. We plowed ahead three more hours and finally achieved Albuquerque. Ms. Garmin told us to exit onto Wyoming Avenue, guided us to Academy Road and Ventura Blvd., Freedom Way and DeVargas Loop, to Bent Road and all the way to number 9516. At last, the trip was over!

We set up the litter box in the shower in the master bedroom, put out dry food and water, turned on the AC and went out in search of something to eat. Garmin tried to help us with that, but we ended up finding a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant without her help. Then we went to the Walmart and Smith's Grocery Store near the house and stocked up on some necessary items.

The ensuing week was one of discovery, work and frustration. Our cellular phone service worked perfectly everywhere but in or around the house. Our land line with DSL would not be installed until Tuesday. The PODS people kept trying to call us to schedule delivery but couldn't get through. If we called them we had to have account numbers and passwords ready in a spot where the phones worked. Carmen finally borrowed Brittany's super duper phone and got everything straightened out. POD 1 arrived Monday morning, traded out for POD 2 on Wednesday.

Once my stainless steel shelving was here I began my early morning routine with feeding kitties, making coffee, eating breakfast and assembling shelf units. When we saw that there was space on the two-car garage for two more sets, we went to Sam's and bought a membership and two more sets of shelves. Now both sides of the garage are lined with shelves, and one car space is piled with stuff. Moving in July will be much easier than last year.

Brittany helped us unload the PODS as much as she could with one hand tied to her phone ("Whatcha doin?") and she still had no clue about closing doors to prevent cats or air conditioning escaping the house. Still, she helped unload and carry stuff in. So we all took the Sandia Peak Aerial Tramway to the top of the Sandias one afternoon, we went to Old Town for supper and souvenir shopping one evening, and we went to the Family Fun Center for go-carts, bumper boats and putt putt golf on the night before she flew back to Houston. It was fun, but we were all glad to have it over.

So we got our phones and computers fired up, and I began dilligently searching for a job. I am still searching, although I have had a few things going on. I've been an extra now on all three TV shows filmed in Albuquerque. I built most of the scenery for Albuquerque Little Theatre's production of White Christmas. I worked eleven hours on the Isletta Pueblo exhibit for the Albuquerque Museum. I fabricated an ox head for the First Unitarian Church Christmas play. And I've written a fascinating blog about my adventures on the road since 1972. Add that to about two hundred games of Scrabble on Facebook and you have a life well lived.

I hope I can find a job in our next location.

Catch you sometime after July!