Here she is, in the first few minutes of our 10-hour car ride from Philadelphia to Maine:
Before I show you some more pictures, I should admit that when it comes to pets in the car, I am old-school (or, as Britney Spears would say, "country.") I don't strap my pets in or rig them up in car seats; I take the throw-all-the-kids-in-the-way-back-of-the-wood-paneled-station-wagon approach. For this trip, Dorothy sat in her bed behind the driver's seat where I, in the passenger seat, could see her. My cats were next to her in their carriers, placed bunkbed style (oh, the horror! --I know) one on top of the other.
Plum likes his carrier locked and secure and would prefer to not venture out for even one iota of a second. Posy, on the other hand, likes her carrier door to be wide open so she can leave it every ten minutes and walk into the front seat and purr and talk loudly on my lap. I don't know what she is saying --it sounds like a series of squawks and trills and chirps -- but she purrs and kneads my lap as she is saying it, so I figure it is generally happy talk, and not of the "are we there yet?" whining variety.
Here is Posy on her way up from front to back (notice Dorothy worrying about the injustice of Posy being allowed to do something that Dorothy is not):
And here she is next to her Grandfather, enjoying the view of the road and the sun on her whiskers:
For the first two hours of the trip, Posy comes up to the front every ten minutes and then sits for ten minutes and then returns to her carrier. After that, she begins to spend slightly longer in her carrier than she does on my lap, until finally, the last four or so hours of the trip she is basically snoozing happily in the carrier, as pictured below:
The worst part of the free-range car-cat system is that by the end of the trip, the dashboard of the car looks angora, plastered as it is with cat hair. But it works for us!
2 comments:
There is little that Wilhemina enjoys more than a car ride. She loves to stand with her tiny feet on the dashboard and peer out the window and scream her head off. She loves to stand in the driver's lap with her tiny feet on the driver's door and peer out the window and scream her head off. She lets go of vast quantities of fur, which swirl through the car and attach to the people's faces. It's all Most Pleasing. Her favorite spot is still right under the driver's feet--which worked well when she was a wee tiny kitten and now doesn't work at all. The only time she has ever been in a carrier is when I got Roxy. Riding in the car together was their very first meeting. Before too long, Wilhemina had persuaded me to open the carrier, and she claimed her dog immediately, climbed right onto Roxy, curled up, and took a nap. Ordinarily, W. is not a talkative cat, but like Posy, she has plenty to say when she gets in the car.
Wilhemina's reaction to the car sounds a lot like Posy's, what with the vocalizing and the massive release of fur which goes straight to my lipstick! I always think of your cat, Kitty, too, who would just curl up on the floor and go to sleep, right?
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