CATastrophe

We stayed a couple nights in a hotel in Creel, Chihuahua recently.  We parked our van at a gated construction site owned by the hotel, it was either that or park our van on the street and we wanted security.

The day we left the hotel to head for the forest we bought some groceries, including corn tortillas and some dog food.  When we arrived in the forest we left our groceries on the counter top in our van and went to Lago Arareko (a lake) to rent a boat.  We ended up spending about 3 1/2 hours paddling and floating around the lake, admiring the rock formations and serene water.

When we returned to the van, our peace was shattered.  Something had ripped into our food, eating holes in our tortillas and taking mouth fulls of dog food.  We had a rat.  Or a mouse.  Some rodent had made a home in our van.  We had to do something.  I propped a pot open with a stick and tied a string to it that could be reached from bed.  I baited our improvised trap with tortillas smeared in peanut butter.  Mice love peanut butter.  We waited.  No sounds in the night woke me.  Not a scurry disturbed my restful composure.

The next day we decided to just take everything we had out of the van.  Hopefully moving things out would scare the mouse out of the van and end things without resorting to deadly traps.  I opened the back doors of the van.  Erin sat in the middle, ready to scare a rodent out the back of the van.  I moved a couple of things and “Holy shit!  There’s a cat!”  Somehow a small grey and white stray cat had made a hiding spot in the back of the van.  Erin didn’t believe me.

Then the cat tore through the van, desperate to escape.  The cat bounced off the windshield and side windows before I finally opened the door and she tore off into the forest in a flash.  Thus ends the misadventure of the stow away cat.