On vacation

My husband and I recently took a 10 day vacation out to California. Before we left, I needed to figure out what to do with the cats. I figured I had three options:

1) Leave the cats at home and have someone come once a day (or every other day) to replenish food and water.

2) Find someone willing to stay in our apartment and feed the cats.

3) Find someone willing to let the cats stay with them for the duration of our time away.

I got a lot of criticism for not wanting to do the first option. Everyone insisted that cats do just fine by themselves for 10 days. However, I was not so sure *MY* cats would do fine by themselves. We tend to be homebodies, and we are home most evenings. When we're here, we pay a lot of attention to them - we pet them, play with them, talk to them. They love to spend the evenings on our laps. They sleep with us at night and are always near at hand. They aren't the type to disappear into an unused room - they like being near us and around us.

Last summer, we did a lot of weekend trips. We always had a neighbor come by at least once just to check on them and pet them. However, we found that the kitties would often leave "presents" for us to find when we got back. They would only do it while we were gone for a weekend, and they stopped when we started staying home more. So, you can see why I was so hesitant to leave the cats by themselves for 10 days. I wasn't sure what kind of damage they would do being left alone that long - a weekend is one thing, but 10 days is a long time. I didn't really want to risk it because I have a suspicion that the smell of cat urine on carpet never really goes away, since we can't get under it to treat the mat. I like our apartment the way it is - I don't want to deal with the smell or wall fountains or anything. :-)

We tried to think of someone for #2 or #3, and I put the request out to Facebook. I ended up finding an old friend from high school who is in Atlanta going to school right now. She's not in a position to have a cat, but she loves them and she offered to take the kitties for the time! I was so excited. It worked out really well - she said they settled in quite well, and seemed to enjoy their visit, as did she.

Knowing they were being taken care of took a load off my mind while we were gone. I missed them terribly though! I hadn't deleted the pictures from Christmas from my camera, so I would scroll through and look at all the pictures of Lewis and Ebony when I started missing them too much. Glad to be home and be back with them! :-)