Cat Walk

"I guess the whole stroller thing didn't work out?" our friend Sarah asked yesterday when we were talking about whether or not to travel with our cats.

"I'm still trying to teach Lucy to push it without tipping it over," Heidi shook her head. "It isn't easy."

"I meant with Tracey," Sarah corrected her. "I thought that was the idea when she got it-- walking the cats in it."

She was right. I had asked for and received the stroller 4 years ago for my birthday, and after an initial flurry of cat walking, the stroller became nothing more than an elevated cat bed. The cats loved sleeping in it, but rolling around outside? They weren't so sure. Even so, I felt a tinge of regret for not doing more to make cat walking a thing.

That's why I proposed taking the cats along on Lucy's evening walk yesterday. I dug the stroller out of the upstairs closet, and once I placed it next to the dining room bench, bot Tibby and Milo eagerly jumped in. They stiffened a bit when I zipped the mesh closed, and their pupils widened. There was a bit of pathetic mewing as we bumped them out the front door and down the stoop, but they both sat up tall and craned their necks around like periscopes. 

"Let's just walk around the complex," Heidi suggested, and at first I agreed. Then I remembered that it was the boring process of walking the little loop around our neighborhood to acclimate the cats to their stroller that contributed to my loss of interest in cat-walking. 

"I want to take them out of here!" I said, after we had visited with several neighbors who were enjoying the mild summer evening. "We are going down the driveway, past 7-11, and up the big 28th Street hill!" And I don't think it was my imagination that the yowling died down and the cats kind of perked up as we ventured into new territory.

They may become traveling kitties yet!