Gettin' Ready for a "Family" Vacation

Good friends of ours had invited us to spend a week with them at their cabin in northern Wisconsin. With the gliders only recently a foursome (as opposed to two twosomes), we were a little apprehensive about leaving them at home for a week in the care of someone who was not that familiar with them. We asked our friends if they minded if we brought the gliders with us, and they graciously agreed. So, we prepared to take them with us. This involved planning for not only a week away from home, but two long car rides, about 7 1/2 hours each way.

Traveling with gliders is like traveling with young children. Maybe this is the case for most pets, I don't know. At any rate, it did remind me a little of getting ready for a long trip when our children were young. We had to consider everything from their food to their housing arrangements. The housing was the thing that was up in the air. Virga and Cirrus came with a 30w x 30d x 24h bird cage that is collapsible, but still is a little cumbersome to be dragging around. We had checked around on a couple of glider discussion groups for some ideas.  Everything from collapsible dog kennels to tents were considered, but what we decided on was a Ware Pop-Up Pet Playpen. It is 48 inches in diameter, about 24 inches high, and has a fair amount of room for the gliders to run around in. A local store, Farm & Fleet, carried them so I went to buy one for the trip. Our local store was out of them and didn't know when they would get more in. However, the helpful sales person told me that someone had been in to buy one that morning and she was having one sent from a store in about 50 miles west of us. "They have five", she said. So, we decided to drive to the store after work. When we arrived, the salesperson told me that no, they did not have any and hadn't had any since December. I was not happy. She did check with other stores and found a store located 80 miles north of us. She called them and had them hold one for us. We initially planned to pick it up on our way north to Wisconsin. However, what I had found on the visit to our local store was that the floor of this playpen was attached by six Velcro tabs. Gliders like to crawl under things like blankets, so this playpen was not going to work for us as it came out of the package. We decided that the solution would be to buy several yards of Velcro and sew it on the floor so the entire perimeter was sealed. It was now Thursday, so to make the modification we really needed to have the playpen Friday so we could attach the Velcro. On Friday, I made the 80 mile trip north and back, returning with playpen in hand. Sewing on the Velcro to the playpen  itself  (with a sewing machine) was a little challenging, but M was up to the challenge and the entire thing was finished in about 90 minutes. With that out of the way, all that remained was to finish packing.Of course, then we had all of the excitement on Saturday morning I wrote about in my previous post.

Here's what we packed for them:  the pop-up playpen, a small pop-up kennel for them to ride in while in the car, the pop-up tent, their wheel, some toys for them to play with, a bag with pouches, blankets, water bottle, and other miscellaneous stuff, an emergency medical kit along with Foehn's prescription from the vet, food (which had to be kept in a cooler), a frame I made from PVC pipe and plastic hardware cloth on which to hang their sleeping pouch and water bottle in the playpen, and just in case, the collapsed bird cage.

The preparations were crazy this time, mostly because of the playpen hunt. The vacation itself was great. I'll write about that in my next post.