The Big Melbourne Move

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.