Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Cross Country with Quito and Patch

An update to the saga of our HumanGyrrl, our OtherHuman and our two feline neighbors, Patch and Quito, making their way across the country in a small compact car.

They left Seattle on Saturday morning and the humans have really been enjoying the countryside as it goes by. With a 5% chance of actually seeing the peak of Mount Ranier, they did!

For the felines, other than the early morning in the crate "choir of discontent" (as our HumanGyrrl calls it), Quito and Patch have not been too stressed.

In the Utah motel stop, Quito got himself under the king-sized bed mattress which was on a wooden box. The humans had fun dismantling the bed to get him out.

Once the humans are firmly on the road, they've been letting the felines out of their individual crates. The problem has been the sun. When it pours in the windows on the side and back of the car, Quito and Patch don't like it. The air conditioner is OK in the front but struggles to reach the back where the cats are housed. For much of the trip through Utah and Wyoming they were cuddled together in one crate on the shady side of the car. The humans have stuck maps up on the window to keep the passenger side reasonable.

Tuesday they drove through the Colorado mountains so heat wasn't an issue. Wednesday while driving through Kansas even the humans were hot. They started to suspect a problem and stopped in Topeka to discover they were almost out of coolant. All spent about an hour in an air conditioned room at a local JiffyLube while it was worked on; cats in one cage as they prefer, with a little baby just walking ogling them and then a probably 6 year old jabbering away. Cats were wonderful.

Saturday morning: Seattle, Washington
Saturday night: Pendelton, Oregon
Sunday night: Ogden, Utah
Monday night: Granby, Colorado
Tuesday night: Goodland, Kansas
Wednesday night: Springfield, Missouri
Thursday night: Memphis, Tennessee
Friday night: Gainesville, Florida --> they're home!