The day of our Big Melbourne Move
dawned bright and early.
Bright, because the motel put
lights right outside our window that were on all night. Early, because our
neighbours got up at 0400hrs to – I can only presume – get out to the airport
for an early flight.
Hearing her moving around
complaining about her bag being heavy wasn’t the worst part. Her finding her boyfriend hilariously funny,
telling him so several times at the top of her voice, before going for a pee
then using her hairdryer, was. When
they finally departed at around 0530hrs I was pretty much wide-awake and lay in
bed cursing them so bad for the next 90 minutes I’m surprised their plane
didn’t fall out of the sky.
When Neil woke up (after I told
him he was funny, went for a pee, used the hairdryer then poked him a few
times) we packed up our toilet bag and ventured out to the car. The motel didn’t have onsite parking so we’d
parked in some dead-end in some shady looking area and prayed to the Black Humour
Gods that all our worldly belongings didn’t get driven away in the middle of
the night. It would take a lot of
moonlighting work to pay to replace our stuff, and quite frankly, I wasn’t
going to have the time.
Fortunately they were there.
Neil felt the obsessive need to
unpack and repack everything so while he did that I loaded up the GPS with our
destination. It took longer than the
usual 6 seconds for her to calculate our driving route - I think we must have
the budget version.
Our first stop was to pick up
Murmie from the Vet Clinic she was boarding at.
We assumed that after being cooped up all weekend while we were in NZ,
she’d be ever so grateful to see us standing there in the waiting room like
Saviours when the lady bought her out.
I may have watched too many
Lassie shows when I was a kid. As she
appeared around the corner in her cage, and we came into her line of sight, she
turned her back on us and licked her butt.
Getting in the car, we showed Her
Majesty the little areas we’d made for her.
A hole for her cage to fit in (which we’d open once on the road)
surrounded by a soft sleeping bag on the back seat; a little gap at the back
with her litter tray below the level of the windows and our belongings (so she
had privacy); and her little dish of water in a container between our seats for
when she got thirsty.
Clearly we need to work on our
Cat Satisfaction Knowledge because she spent half an hour meowing, then the
next hour trying to get either in the driver’s feet area or in the driver’s
line of sight. The gap by my feet was
not sufficient, nor was the view out my side of the windscreen. I think she has the same mental ailment as
Dory because no matter how many times we stopped her or pushed her away, she’d
be back in about three seconds looking like “Oooh! Look!
Down there, I think I’ll try and get down there. This’ll be fun!” then looked just as
utterley disgusted every single time we blocked her.
During the first half hour, at
one stage as we turned a corner our leftover pizza slid to the back of the car
and fell down by her as-yet-unused litter tray.
Coincidentally, she chose that particular moment to decide she was
completely busting to pee and absolutely had to go as it was a matter of
life or death. Within a nanosecond of
realising where she was headed, Neil pulled into a side road, stopped the car,
commando-crawled his way back through our fully-laden station wagon and
retrieved the pizza box, avoiding the oncoming urination by a mere millimetre.
A long and pretty uneventful ten
hours later, we arrived in the outskirts of Melbourne. We did stop in a couple of little towns whose
names we can’t pronounce to load and unload drinks, and we passed a real
Submarine sitting on the side of the road, but other than that the day was
pretty boring.
Except for our near-death
experience, I guess.
One particular drink-unload-stop
was fraught with danger from the moment I said “I need to go” which coincidentally
happened to be approximately 13 metres away from a signposted turnoff, to the
moment Neil decided to manoeuvre from the outside lane PAST a truck on the
inside lane going 90km/hr to indicate for 0.0367 of a second before pulling off
the road into the turnoff which also incidentally turned out to be a 150 degree
turn. As in, back the way we came.
Only by the grace of some higher
Deity did we not get blasted by urine-soaked-kitty-litter-shrapnel from behind,
although they did clearly think it would be hilarious to spill all the water
from her little drinking bowl all over the front of my jeans. Had I known the net result would be the same,
we would have just carried on driving in the first place.
The remainder of the trip was a
little less eventful. I played on my
laptop until it went flat, then I played on my phone until it went flat, then I
played on Neil’s laptop until it went flat, then I played on his phone until he
made me give it back, then I played ‘how long can I sit in one position without
moving?’, then I tried to see how many mini-chocolates I could feed him before
he asked for a drink (I got to 5 in a row), then I played ‘how many trees can I
count in the space of one Murmie blink’ but I lost that game cos I was so busy
counting trees I didn’t see her blink, then we argued about Neil eating all my
chocolates, then I played ‘how long can I poke Murmie in her ear before she
moves?’, and then eventually, we were in Melbourne.
After we missed the correct
motorway turnoff, but before we fixed it and got to our apartments, Murms
decided to use the litter tray for the second time that day. I’m unsure how she managed to pull it off
quite so well, given that she hadn’t eaten anything all day, but her by-product
had us weaving all over the motorway as we gagged out the windows that we could
only open an inch, with the air conditioning cranked up on hot because it was
so cold. We were at least thankful that
she wasn’t trying to improve on her height record and we could still see out
the back window.
She wasn’t concerned at all. She came back to sit on Neil’s lap and preen
herself whilst looking all innocent and ladylike. I think she gets special treatment to be
honest – if I’d done that, there’s no way Neil would have let me back on his
lap that soon.
Once we arrived at the
Apartments, fate would have it that there were no immediate car parks
available, so we had to negotiate several three-point-turn, reversing and
back-tracking moments – generally all the things you’d least like to be doing
when stuck in a car with cat faeces.
Of course, when checking in we
were all smiles.
“Oh hi, yes, thanks, nice to be
here too, yes yes, our cute little cat in her little cage, yep yep, she’s just
LOVELY, our wee dear, yep $350 bond? No
problems, would you like to do a pre-auth on our Visa instead of taking
cash? We need the money for rent and bond
and we’re completely confident that she’s not going to cause an ounce of
damage, oh ha ha ha ha, us and our well-behaved cat, thank you, thank you, this
way to our room?”
Walking over the threshhold to our new home, the
resting place at the end of our intrepid journey, our new nest in which to
begin our exciting adventure, we were greeted with a sight that brought fear to
our hearts and tears to our eyes.
A brand new couch, net curtains,
and light fawn carpets.
