We’re almost there! In fact, I think we are there. I think I’ve succeeded in raising a couple of travel cats, and pretty much have things figured out for how to travel with them, including long trips–they/we did fine on a 10 day jaunt around the Northwest back in September.
But off leash cat walks–that’s the icing on the cake. Went camping last week for a couple of nights, with the goal of taking a walk in the woods with all three critters. Headed for Foster Bar, because it’s relatively remote, and mostly used by day-trippers as a place to unload from the river, so I figured we’d have the campground to ourselves, and we did. Et voilá!
<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/109598420″>catwalk 2a</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user33545867″>Jean Mitchell</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>That’s us coming back from the morning run to the rest room, not a long jaunt, maybe a couple hundred yards. Took a side trip over to the creek on the way back:
<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/109523868″>Off leash cat walk in camp 1</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user33545867″>Jean Mitchell</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>After breakfast went for a longer walk–I was interested in seeing just how far I could take them and still feel they were into it. Have not yet found that limit. Following photos are from that walk, which was about half an hour, maybe a bit longer.
(I swear there’s a cat up there somewhere.)
There’s no cat in the next one, it’s just a picture of the creek that I thought was pretty.
After lunch we took a walk up a little road next to the river that goes up to a lodge area that seems to be closed, though it looked very nice so I don’t know why it wouldn’t be used. The cats were very enthusiastic about seeing buildings and wanted to explore them–I had quite a time coaxing them away. Here are a couple shots from along the road on our way back to the van. This walk was about 20 minutes altogether.
After that we headed over to Quosatana campground, but before leaving I’ll show you this. The evening we got to Foster Bar I saw a couple of woodpeckers, red heads and everything. I’ve seen woodpeckers before, but not frequently, so was a bit thrilled. You can just see one of them in the following picture, which isn’t very good–I need to get a camera that does better in low light than the iphone. Anyway, here it is. Look in the middle, just above the branch.
Quosatana was lovely. There was one other set of campers, but since Quosatana has two campground areas, I set up in the other one and totally felt like I had the place to myself. The deer were out in force when we arrived.
They went elsewhere after a bit. My animals didn’t seem to disturb them too much, but on the other hand, they seemed to think, they could just as well be elsewhere. The cats, especially Phantom, were very interested in them, but didn’t do anything rash like try to chase them. Shadow did chase a squirrel up a tree, though.
Took a couple of short walks down by the river, but didn’t get a lot of pictures. Missed the best possibilities because I forgot I had the phone with me :-(, but here are a few. The first has no critters in it, I was just trying to get the peace of the river in later afternoon.
There’s a cat in this one, though you can barely see it.
Here’s Phantom up a tree, back in camp.
But there’s more to camping than walks. There’s mornings, too. I never get tired of watching CJ when she’s flat out–
Or watching Phantom try to sneak in a snuggle next to her–
Or watching her nibble on him.
Altogether, I think we’re good to go, literally. Will take them out every 3-4 weeks or so, to maintain habits (theirs and mine), and plan a multi-week trip to CA in February, and then the big one, the next cross-country trip back east, late next summer. We can do this!
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