An Hour of Anxiety

We’re on the road again, currently in Cape Cod. Those who actually follow our meanderings around the country will know that on our last trip we had to have Comet euthanized. (This was one of our cats, not Santa’s reindeer.) Over the winter we picked up a replacement cat. He’s an energetic, large, long-haired, goofy, friendly part Maine Coon Cat named Maxwell. (Pictures to follow).

Our other cat, Ginny (AKA Kitten) has been on all of our trips and is now a seasoned traveler. The only problem is that she doesn’t like Maxwell very much, so we anticipated having them together in the trailer might present some problems.

So, yesterday we loaded them in the trailer and drove 280 miles to Cape Cod. We set up camp and when we went into the trailer, Max was hiding under a chair, and Kitten was missing in action. Now, there aren’t a lot of places for a cat to hide in a 32 foot trailer, and we looked everywhere at least twice. There’s a storage area under the bed, and under that area, sealed off with a piece of plywood, is another area containing the hydraulics and mechanical stuff that pushes the slide, upon which the bed is mounted, in and out. We had looked under there a couple of times, but there was no Kitten.

We had just about given up and assumed that she somehow figured a way to escape from the trailer. We were about to put up posters around the campground when we decided to look under the bed a third time, This time I removed the plywood that separates the storage and mechanical areas and tucked in a corner was a little black and white cat. Apparently when the trailer was in the shop over the winter, the technician who was repairing the bedroom slide forgot to firmly reattach the plywood separator, which apparently moved enough while we were in transit to give Kitten room to climb behind it. Then it apparently moved back, sealing her in place.

Now we don’t know if she kept quiet while we were calling her name because she was punishing us for making her travel with her long-haired nemesis, or if she was just playing hide-and-seek. And she’s not talking.  So we’re fully-catted once again, and hopefully our furry traveling companions will learn to get along with each other.