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There are many stories about cats finding their way home from strange locations, sometimes hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. Those are truly amazing tales. But such stories are usually about a cat returning to a known home, often where they've lived for some time.
This story is about a cat that came "home" to a motel while on vacation.
We decided to take our cat, Twister, with us on our vacation to Alaska a few years ago. She enjoyed riding in our van, as she was still quite young - not yet a year old. And we didn't want to leave her at home with a drop-in pet sitter who might only appear 3 or 4 times a week to fill the food and water bowls. She needed a vacation, too. So we took her along.
She had a ball! She learned to walk on a leash, played with the windshield wipers during rainstorms (from inside, on the dashboard), watched the road coming at us from her perch on the dash, watched the road disappear behind us from her other perch in back, and chased objects from bed to bed in motel rooms. She had fun, and we had fun watching her and playing games with her.
It took a week to get to Alaska, and we took a room in Anchorage for three nights to catch up on laundry, reorganize the van, and take a break from long hours at the wheel every day.
On our first night in that motel, we let Twister off her leash after we had everything we needed out of the van for the night, as we had done every other night. What we didn't realize was that this motel did not have screens on the windows. And one window was open as it was a very warm evening. While we took turns showering and changing into clean clothes, we did not become alarmed immediately when we did not see Twister for a while. At every motel she hid under the bed until she got used to each room. Then she would come out and play.
When she did not come out after the usual hour-long adjustment period, we decided to drag her out. But she was not there! Then we discovered the open window. Our hearts sank.
She had been in 7 motels so far, in 7 cities, it was 10 p.m. already, she's black, and this motel was situated on a very busy intersection that had traffic all night long. We took our flashlights and went looking anyway, expecting to see her body by the side of the road after being hit by a car or truck.
But we saw nothing. We asked at the filling stations on the corner to keep an eye out, but the clerks were disinterested. We headed back to our room, crestfallen. We went to bed, unable to sleep, the window she had escaped from directly over our heads. We lay in silence, watching the curtain billow in over our heads in the breeze.
At 3 a.m., still awake, the curtain billowed again and was followed by a soft thump onto the mattress between our heads. It was Twister! We were flabbergasted, to say the least. How had she found her way "home" to this strange place in a strange city? How did she know which window to jump into? She must not have gone very far, of course, but she was nowhere nearby when we looked 5 hours earlier.
After welcoming her "home," we all slept contentedly that night. But we also learned a lesson about traveling with pets. Twister had her collar and tags on, but what good is a Nebraska phone number when we weren't home to answer a call? We made temporary tags for the rest of our trip that included the day's information. When we got home, we contacted the Humane Society of the United States and obtained a tag with an 800 number on it that calls into their national registry.