Sometimes, Rick Steves’ guidebooks are not clear. I quote, for example, his saying that one of the smaller valleys in this area is “more gentle and accessible with better and more level roads.” Ha! Either we missed a turn, or Rick was smoking something. But I get ahead of myself.

After we got ready and had breakfast at our hotel, we jumped in the car. Logarska Dolina is the major valley in this region, but there are two smaller valleys here as well. One, we explored yesterday on the end of our drive on the Panoramic Road. The other was the morning’s destination, and Rick boldly proclaimed it as easy to deal with, which was good after the logging road we seemed to be using yesterday.

The road up into the valley started off a bit intimidating. It was paved, but was certainly only one car wide, with no turnoffs. We got through that well, and the road widened out. Well and good. After a little distance with great views, the pavement ended. Odd, but still okay. Then the road took a major hairpin turn and narrowed. Then it had another hairpin turn. Soon, we were driving way up over fields and other drop-offs, with no guard rails, no sight lines, and very few places to pull off. The views were spectacular, but the driving was white-knuckle in many places. We kept driving up and up and up, hairpin curve after hairpin curve, until we came to a grouping of three farms and a dead end. Drat – we’d have to drive down that same road. Happily, Meredith asked me how the brakes were, which reminded me that in the standard-shift vehicle we had, I could leave it in first gear and not use the brakes much. We made it down safely, but I was very glad not to have to do that drive again.

After the Fun Drive (and the views were amazing, I have to say), we drove over to the major valley, Logarska Dolina, with its major roads, biking trails, walking trails, some hotels, and some restaurants. I was pleased to pay seven euros to get in if it meant I could drive normally in the park.

Meredith wanted to start with the major waterfall in the park, Rinka waterfall. You can drive almost to the waterfall, about five miles into the park. You need to walk the rest of the way along a decent, if somewhat rocky, trail that takes about fifteen minutes to get to the falls. They are worth it. The falls do not have a heavy volume of water, but that makes it more interesting. They are very high at three hundred feet, and the water breaks up some as it falls in waves and is blown around by the wind. The short of it is that the falls move left and right as the wind gusts, and it is fascinating to watch. You can hike right up to the edge of the falls, and there is an observation platform with a small store. Meredith and I took advantage of both by having the world’s most scenic ice cream stop – falls on one side and towering cliffs all around.

The cliffs in the park are amazing. They are almost all grey, with very steep sides. They are around 6500 feet tall, and they seem to loom over you if you get close enough to the bases of the mountains.

When we got back to the car, Meredith wanted to drive halfway down the valley to a tourist information station, and then walk the hiking trail back to the parking lot of the falls, which would be roughly a two-mile walk, which would take about an hour each way.

Three small issues. One – the tourist information station was closed. Two – the stopping spot was more than halfway to the entrance. Three – the walk took us two full hours, one way. But I get ahead of myself.

The start of the trail was very peaceful – it seemed deep in the woods, even though the road was never far away. In the full two hours and twenty minutes we spent on the trail in the park, both before and after supper, we never saw another soul on the trail. My theory, which Mer likes, is that bikers use the road and the serious hikers hike on the alpine trails. At any rate, we had the place to ourselves.

The trail was quite varied over the length of it. We had smooth, pine-needle soft footing, heavily rooted trail, gravel parts, and steep, rocky sections. It started out flat, but slowly rose for most of the trail, ending with some heavy-breathing sections of trail. It was not always perfectly marked – we had to guess at several points, and made one serious mistake that, if we had not corrected it, would have had us hiking up to a mountain hut. We caught that one after only a couple of minutes. Generally, the trail was engulfed in trees, but that made it very dramatic when they would open up and you would see the mountains looming over you. We crossed dry stream beds full of gravel, and we came up toward the falls in such a way that we could see them from a distance, which you can’t do if you take the road.

By the end of the trail, we were both pretty tired – it had taken two hours over some rough terrain. By mutual consent, we took the road back toward our car, which was still a forty-five-minute walk. Our car was parked across the street from a farm/hotel/restaurant, so we grabbed supper there even though it was only 5:00. We got to eat at the most scenic table on the planet, and the food was farm fresh and pretty healthy.

After supper, we checked out the waterfall behind the hotel, which was not a free-fall waterfall like the bigger one, but was still impressive and came down over the rock face in several channels. Mer wanted to walk a little more, so we walked another ten minutes down the walking trail, away from the falls. It was more of the same with lots of trees and some glimpses of mountains, but it was pretty and super quiet. We felt really isolated.

We drove out of the valley and toward the small village next to our hotel. We were going to grab some dessert, but before we did, we ran into Nina, our young museum guide from yesterday. We wanted to show her a picture of a rare flower we took. She was impressed, but informed us it wasn’t the flower we’d thought it was. Ah. Still, we talked with her for thirty or more minutes, about multiple topics, from where she goes to school to Slovenian politics to the breakup of Yugoslavia. She was warm and friendly, and we love talking with locals.

We missed all of the stores in the village closing, so we drove back to the smaller valley to see if we could find where we had missed the “easy” road. We could not, and rather than get stuck on that nail-biter road again, I turned around. We went back to our hotel, where we had dessert from their restaurant, on the deck, overlooking the mountains as the sun went down. It was a fine evening (and day).

One thing you can count on for sure on a Meredith-led sightseeing tour is you will sleep well. I did not wake up at all last night, and was again surprised when the alarm went off. We wrapped up our time in Ptuj with getting ready, eating breakfast, packing, and checking out. We pointed the car west an hour, and ended up in an industrial town of forty thousand people, Velenje. We were there to see its very scenic castle, which overlooked a very concrete-rich town.

The castle looked like a proper castle, if more luxurious looking. It had a wall and towers, and you even had to enter it via a narrow footbridge. We found the reception area and bought two tickets to the castle and its eclectic collection for only five euros total (about seven dollars). This is already pretty shockingly low, but the woman who took our money then took us around the castle herself, narrating everything in solid but wonderfully, charmingly broken English. She spent almost two hours with us, all for seven bucks.

We saw all of the collections, and we learned about the town along the way. The town was created to work the coal mines of the region, with the city begun around 1950 and officially “opened” just a few years later, having gone from a village to a small city almost overnight. The architecture was classic communist concrete apartment block, but it still was a mighty achievement.

The collections: we started with medieval Valenje, with a look at the church of the time, and how a peasant would have lived. We got distracted with asking questions, so we missed the aristocracy portion of the exhibit. We then moved on to life during Communist times, which in Yugoslavia was not so harsh as in Soviet-style Communism. We got to see several rooms of works by local painters, some of which were very moving. After that was a look at the works of an excellent local sculptor, who is now ninety and still creating art. Next was a collection of African artifacts (including a mask room where the guide started with the lights out and turned on a switch that made some of the eyes glow) that had been the collection of an artist who lived and worked in Africa for over twenty years. He died in Valenje, so his collection and some of his art went to the museum. We were then walked through a mock-up of an early twentieth-century pub and general store. Outside the main keep of the castle, we saw a chapel with artifacts from a church that was flooded by the building of a dam. There was an exhibit of mastodon bones found in the area, and a collection of high school art which was good, including a couple of excellent works. We finished the tour with a small room of WW2 memorabilia and artifacts. It was quite a tour!

We then drove on to our destination for the next two days – Logarska Dolina. Dolina means “valley.” The Logarska region is remote and is protected as a park, so it is very rural. The mountains are the foothills of the region’s Alps, and so are very dramatic. The roads are narrow and winding, and the road was not even built until about 1900, so the region has not been touristed for very long.

We set up camp at our small hotel (with a kitty!), which looks out over the mountains and has a stream running right next to it – beautiful. We drove into the small town about a mile away to visit the information center and to get lunch (lunch was a sandwich from the local supermarket). While I was waiting outside the bathroom for Meredith, I struck up a conversation with the young woman who was at the information desk. She was very friendly, and so when Meredith came out of the bathroom, we did all the things she recommended. We watched a fifteen-minute film on the region, and then she took us through a small mock-up of the area’s highlights, geography, and culture. She escorted us up the hill to another building to show us a butterfly collection and fossils found in Logarska Dolina or nearby. She was a great guide, and all of this was free. On her recommendation, we climbed a little higher to get a close look at the village church.

We stopped in at the information center again for some dessert to fuel us for the next sightseeing jaunt – a drive along the Panoramic Road, which is a sometimes two-lane road that is sometimes paved that winds up into the alpine fields and farms. Happily, except for the first half-mile on the paved section, I never met an oncoming car over the whole eight-mile trip, which took us about two hours.

The scenery was amazing. I kept stopping the car to get out and look and to try to take photographs that I knew would never capture the depth of the mountains. Then, we would go another half-mile, and I’d have to stop and get out again. It was cloudy and still beautiful – it must be spectacular on a sunny day. We extended our driving trip by taking an unpaved road around part of the valley. There were parts of the road that reminded me of logging roads – rough and not very wide. It was not so scenic as the Panoramic Road, but it was still worthwhile. As an aside, we took one wrong turn, which we quickly sorted out. If we had not, in just a few minutes we would have been at the Austrian border.

We got back to the hotel around 8:00, and so we settled in for the night. We got supper in the hotel restaurant and then decided to get ready for bed. The temperature is supposed to get into the forties tonight, so we’re anticipating another sound sleep after a busy Day Four.

Europeans have several clear advantages over Americans. One, they serve hot chocolate at every breakfast, winter or summer. Two, bathrooms are private privies, being mini-rooms inside larger public restrooms. Three, most modern European places have built-in shades that slide over the window completely, blocking all light.

It was this last feature that made me surprised when the alarm went off – it was still dark, so I could not understand why the beeping started. It turns out it was 8:30 am, since breakfast only went until 9:30, but it seemed early to my eyes.

Breakfast was included in our B and B, and it was a continental affair, with granola, yogurt, breads, meats, cheeses, and so on. In an exciting international moment, what I thought was strawberry jam turned out to be some rather pungent meat puree. Happily, Meredith warned me to that possibility before I ate it.

After breakfast, we crossed over the river on the pedestrian/bike bridge, and we walked ten minutes along the river. Along the way, we spotted two kitties, one of which was very happy to have his head petted. We ended up at the local spa/water park. The spa has saunas and whirlpool tubs and swimming pools and… water slides. As one does. The park did not look open quite yet (it was 10:30), so we decided to go to Plan B – to go back and get the car and go to Maribor.

Maribor is one of my leading town candidates for 1950s film monster names (as in, “Release the… MARIBOR!”). Above and beyond providing me with some quirky humor, Maribor is Slovenia’s second biggest city (after the capital Ljubljana), with about 130,000 people. The downtown area is busy, but has some good walking sights, so we visited those.

After parking the car in a hotel garage (for about five dollars), we walked to a large square near the river, which is the same one that runs through Ptuj, the Drava. We took a look at a monument to plague victims that was in the square, and then we headed down to the river to walk along it for a bit. We saw a couple of swans, some ducks, some very lovely willow trees, a nice bridge with water fountains shooting into the river, and an old fortress that had been converted to a wine shop. It was a very pleasant walk.

We headed back up to the square and into the main pedestrian zone. It started to rain lightly, so we stopped at a café to grab a hot chocolate for me. Sadly, the mist kept falling, so we continued on to look at a Franciscan church. Meredith knows I am a St. Francis fan, so I like to see Franciscan churches. This one was made of brick, and was fairly new, having been finished around 1900.

Meredith’s trusty guidebook by Rick Steves recommended a small museum for those interested in history, so we checked it out. It turned out to be a very interesting museum. It covered Slovenia’s involvement in WW1 and WW2, with some focus on Maribor in the war. The WW1 and WW2 portions were presented side by side, so you could compare causes of each war, weapons in each war, medical treatment, women’s participation, propaganda, and so on. It was fascinating to do it that way, and we learned a lot. You could even send a Morse code message from one bunker in one room to another bunker in another room, assuming your partner did not confuse dots and dashes.

We finished up our tour of Maribor with a visit to its small cathedral. The cathedral’s main interest for me was its stained glass windows. Four of the windows were representations of the four Gospels, and they were created in 2004. Another window showed Pope John Paul II and was dated 1999. We thought it must have been to commemorate a visit, but were not sure. Meredith pointed out it was the first time she recognized someone from our lifetime in a stained glass window.

Back in Ptuj, we grabbed a quick bite to eat at a bakery (it was around 4:30), before heading back to the spa. The water park was still closed because it was too cold out, but the spa was open. We changed in the free-for-all coed changing areas that happily had individual booths, and made our way into the spa. We spent much of our time there in one or another of the three hot tubs, but in between sessions there, we found one fun water slide that was attached to the spa itself, and it was running. The slide was interesting in itself – the slide was an enclosed tube. The top was illuminated with pictures of the Coliseum in Rome and the Parthenon and some random pictures of flames. The middle section was lit in an orange-pink light, and the bottom section was in total darkness, which was a bit freaky. We must have ridden the slide at least ten times, and as far as we could tell, we were the only people over the age of thirty going on it.

We did also swim in the pool, but I found it to be a fair amount of work to swim a lap, so the hot tubs won out over the pool. Mer wanted to try the sauna, and I cautiously agreed. We went to the least-hot sauna (around 120 degrees), and I opened the door. Dante yelled to stop letting all the cold air in, so I slammed it shut. Actually, there were already people in there, and the brief exposure to that much heat and steam caused me to take a step back. No, thank you! The hottest sauna was a whopping 210 degrees; why people would do that is beyond me.

The spa was a great treat coming so soon after a long airplane trip. I told Mer more than once that it was the best day touring ever.

After the spa, we walked back to the town to grab supper at a pizza place, where we ate outside, as we have most of our meals here. We were determined to find ice cream, but the ice cream places were all closed at 9:30 – who knew? We found a restaurant that served pastries, and we ate those out on the main (new) square of the town, which was almost empty. It was a quiet ending to a fairly mellow day. Here is hoping for a good night’s sleep in my very dark room.

We woke up in Zagreb, Croatia, which is important to establish on a trip that covers three countries in fourteen days. We showered and got ready, and moseyed out to a bakery on the main square to pick up some breakfast pastries, which we took back to our hostel and ate in their lovely enclosed courtyard.

Then we packed up, checked out, and set out to pick up our rental car. With the help of Google Maps (thank you!), we figured out which tram and then which bus to take to get to the car rental place. We got there with only a little difficulty in finding the bus stop. It turned out that their computer system was down, so they drove us back out to the airport and dropped us there. The computer was down there as well, but the young man at the desk filled out the forms by hand and away we drove, listening to Cat Stevens and the Beatles on Croatian radio. We were headed to Ptuj (pit-too-ey) in Slovenia, a trip of only a little over an hour, made much easier by my strangely-ahead-of-the-game thought to buy a GPS with the Europe maps loaded on it, a week before we left home. It worked like a charm.

The roads in Croatia are excellent, with the highway having a speed limit of 80 mph. When we got close to the border, we had to go through several tunnels in smaller mountains. The border crossing was almost effortless – the guards on both sides of the border looked at our passports and the Slovenian guard stamped them.

We arrived at Ptuj around noon. I found the town to be charming – it is built on a small hill, with a scenic river out in front, and red-tiled homes huddled together. We found our B and B, an amazing little place called Silak (shee-lahk). It is run by a very friendly couple who informed us the house is between five hundred and eight hundred years old (the oldest records were lost in a fire, so they do not know for sure). It is always humbling to sleep somewhere older than my country. The B and B has beautiful exposed beams, marble tile in the bathroom, slanting roofs (which Mer has always loved), air conditioning, and internet access. I highly recommend it.

Once we dumped our stuff, we set out to wander the small town and to acquire some light lunch. On the recommendation of our host at the B and B, we stopped off at the library in town and made our way to the top floor. The top floor showed off an amazing array of exposed beams, and had good views of the river. We then wandered up the hill a bit, skipping the tempting stairs to the castle, and made our way through the old small square to the newer square, where we found a bakery. We munched on cheese bread while sitting on a bench outside the town hall, where we got to observe the very quiet town in all of its inaction. My kind of place.

After lunch, we did head up to the castle. The castle is now a very eclectic museum, housing several collections. We started with the mask collection, which is really a costume collection of the costumes villagers wear for a parade late in winter. The parade is designed to drive off winter and bring in spring, so it has a fertility feel for much of it – plows and livestock and a display of eligible young men and women. The main focus of the parade is the flock of Kurent demons – people dressed up in wool, masks, horns, stick, and cowbells, who are supposed to frighten the winter away.

Once we had seen the mask museum, we entered the main section of the castle itself (which is more of a fortified mansion than a typical defensive castle). The main floor is now a museum of the furniture that had been used in the castle, from the 1700s until the 1900s. You can also see the three-hundred-year-old plastered ceilings with their still-intact ornamentations.

Next on the tour list was the castle’s festival hall, which is still used for concerts. The hall is surrounded by huge portraits of various people groups, mostly Turks, and all certainly done by people who had never seen a Turkish or a Chinese or a Native American person before.

We headed upstairs to the third floor to look at the art collection of the castle, which is mostly paintings of the lords and ladies of Ptuj, along with copies of masterpieces done by local artists. That was fascinating – it was interesting to see why talented locals were not so good as world masters – it generally came down to details – background figures were not painted in detail, or foreground subjects had no life to them (no individual hairs on the head, clothes not fluid, etc.).

We wound our way down to the ground floor again to look at the musical instrument collection, which includes the remains of several rare Roman instruments. There are also sixteenth-century lutes, and a good collection of harpsichords and pianos, along with some old marching band instruments.

The last of the collection is the armory, where there were a couple of suits of armor, several small cannon, some firearms of various types and ages, and lots of swords. The most impressive part was they had a two-handed great sword lying out for people to heft for photographs. It was very heavy.

We had dodged a short but heavy rain while in the castle, and so with good weather we headed back to the B and B to regroup before supper. After a fifteen-minute rest, Mer took me to a local monastery that had been destroyed by bombs in World War 2, but had been rebuilt in stages from the 1980s to 2010. The church of the monastery is simple, modern, and one of the most beautiful churches I have ever seen. The stained glass is modern, with vibrant colors and shapes suggesting Biblical events instead of showing them outright. In one window was a shape suggesting Jesus wearing the crown of thorns. In another was probably a boat that could have been Jesus calming the storm or walking on the water, or could have been Noah’s ark. They were very impressive. The church also had modern art versions of the stations of the cross that were more suggestive than literal, and several of them were very moving. Inside the church was one older lady who was very friendly, but did not speak English. We both felt bad that we could not understand her, as she was talkative and seemed very proud of the church.

For supper, we swung by the room and then we walked the short distance over to the Amadeus restaurant, where we promptly ate too much. I made the mistake of thinking a “starter course” was an appetizer, when it really is a full meal in itself. I have no idea how the Italians, who eat multi-course meals often, do it. By the time my real meal came, I was comfortably full. I foraged on – it was a very good meal.

We saw some rain coming after supper, so we went back to the room to wait it out, which took about twenty minutes. Then, we strolled the town to a cute restaurant for dessert. The restaurant had a patio built around three trees that had the thickest foliage I have ever seen. As such, you sat under a canopy of leaves. It was pretty marvelous. We had some cake, and I got my first European hot chocolate of this trip – that I pretty much had to eat with a spoon (European hot chocolate is pretty thick). After a quick walk down to the river and across the pedestrian bridge for an evening view of Ptuj, we went back to the B and B to escape the rain that had just started up again. Thus ended Day Two of our little adventure.

Day One of our European vacations is mellow out of necessity. After traveling for twenty or thirty hours with little or no sleep, it is wise to take the first day fairly easy. Having said that, we don’t like to waste time either.

The airport at Zagreb is tiny – I think the Akron/Canton airport is bigger. Passport control asked no question, but did stamp our passports, and customs had a “nothing to claim” line that led right outside. Once outside, we jumped on a bus that would take us to the city bus station. In an example of the dominance of American entertainment culture, the radio played nothing but pop songs in English the whole twenty-minute trip to the bus station.

My impression of Zagreb was mixed. The outskirts of the city seemed to be all communist-era huge apartment blocks that thought concrete was the end-all and be-all in architecture. On the other hand, there seemed to be parks everywhere, with good bike trails and sidewalks.

From the bus station, we picked up a tram ticket that would take us to the main square of the old (non-communist) section of town. While we waited, we struck up a conversation with a young American couple who were in Croatia on their delayed-from-October honeymoon, with a planned visit to Moscow at the end of the trip. That is an adventurous couple!

The tram arrived, and we were whisked to the very cute old part of town. We still had a ten-minute walk with some backtracking to find our hostel. We dumped our luggage and put into practice our sure-fire way to break jet lag – we took a two-hour nap. There are two common trains of thought about European jet lag – get to the hotel and sleep, or stay up all day until normal local bedtime. In the first case, we have always felt that going to sleep right away just keeps you on your old sleep schedule, and you would be wide awake in the middle of the local night. In the second case, staying up for what would be thirty or more hours sounds like a great way to be miserable on your first day. We compromise by taking a two-hour nap and then forcing ourselves to get up and go to dinner. It lets us still get some touring in (about three hours today), but keeps us feeling more or less normal.

We basically wandered around the old part of the city, based around a giant public square. We took a quick look inside a free exhibit on the European Space Agency, and we saw a fun little sculpture of the sun, and two to-scale tiny sculptures of Mars and Venus (they were planted around the city by a second artist, which caused the locals to have to figure out where they were). We bumped into a Croatian male a cappella singing group (a national genre), which we listened to for a couple of songs. We heard a beautiful song in Croatian coming out of a church on the main square, one that we know in English. We rode the shortest funicular (steep train) in Europe to get to the hill overlooking the city, wound around the streets to a beautiful church, down past the old red-light district, which is where the restaurants now are, where we ate on the sidewalk of a good restaurant and we people-watched. We had dessert at a cookie place (we had the excellent mint brownies), and we finished off by wandering over to the cathedral, which had a beautiful illuminated front entrance. By then, it was starting to rain, so we walked back to the hostel to call it a night. It was not an ambitious day, but it was not supposed to be – it was just Day One.

This year, Mer’s European vacation fund got used for a tour of Croatia, Slovenia, and a quick side-trip into Bosnia. But first, we had to get there.

As usual, we took advantage of the cheap flights offered out of Toronto. Since Toronto is 4.5 hours away on a good (no traffic) day, I decided we should head up there Friday night and spend the night before our Saturday evening flight to London and on to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia.

The only slight hitch in the plan was that we had promised to go to the graduation party of one of Meredith’s students at 5:00. We figured that would work well, as it was close to home and on the way north, and we could treat it as supper; that would allow us to get to Toronto efficiently.

We got off to a late start, as seems usual with our trips, leaving the house around 5:30. Then, we were at the graduation party later than I expected, not leaving until around 6:45. Happily, the GPS estimated we would get to our hotel before midnight.

The trip up to Canada was uneventful – no bad weather, no traffic to speak of, and an easy border crossing. We did indeed get to the hotel around midnight. The hotel was very nice, and only a mile from the airport, and had a generous checkout time of noon. We took advantage of that by sleeping in late and not checking out on Saturday until right at noon.

Our flight was not until 6:40 pm, so we had some time. We grabbed lunch (breakfast for us) at the Subway next door, then we programmed the GPS to find James Gardens Park, which was only five miles away. The GPS found it, and took us to the nearest point of the park, which was a residential neighborhood with no access to the park (it was fenced off). It was not hard to backtrack and find a parking lot, and so we set out on a very pleasant stroll in the park.

James Gardens is a narrow strip of land that runs for some ways along a wide and shallow (and muddy, thanks to the recent rains) river. The paths were mostly in the shade, which was great, since the sun was out and it was warm.

We walked for about forty-five minutes, and then turned around. The river was quite lovely, and we actually found the garden part of James Garden – it was a large and wide area of the park, and there were lots of flowers about. The path wound through the woods, and finally crossed the river over a fun little pedestrian bridge that afforded great views of a road bridge above it. It was a great way to spend some extra time.

Not enough extra time, as it turns out. We got to the airport around 2:30, and were told that the check-in desk would not open until 3:30. We found a seat and I got us some food from Wendy’s, and we waited until the desk opened.

The check-in process was a bit lengthy and chaotic, but we still were at our gate an hour-and-a-half early. Better safe than sorry, I suppose. I started in on reading The Hunger Games, so I could finally understand references the students make. Mer kept reading Moby-Dick (her summer reading) and dipping around in her copy of Rick Steves’s guidebook on the Balkans.

The flight to London went well, except the flight was so full that Meredith and I could not sit together. We were separated by a row and a couple of seats, but in such a way that we could still see each other, which was good. In an unusual twist, I spent most of the flight reading The Hunger Games, which I finished and enjoyed, while Meredith watched a bunch of movies on the entertainment system (usually it is the other way around:  she reads, and I don’t). I finished the flight by watching The Importance of Being Earnest, so I had a very book-centered flight.

The transfer to the flight to Zagreb went fine, although we used most of our two-hour layover getting through security and such, so we only had about ten minutes to spare before we loaded a bus to go out to the plane on the tarmac. I dozed some on the two-hour-twenty-minute flight, since I had been up about twenty hours at that point.

We touched down and got on another bus that drove us a laughably short distance of maybe two hundred yards to the airport. We had arrived in Croatia!

a tribute to Jackson
(aka Jackso-beast or Back Beast, and, more recently, Scrawnycat or Old Bones)

“…So we think you and Matt would be able to give this cat a great home,” concluded the voice on the other end of the phone.

Our colleague’s wife Linda had heard that we’d lost our cat Bocca earlier that month, at about the same time that she and her husband had decided they needed to find a different home for their cat Jackson. Adopted as a young adult stray, Jackson had been especially close to Linda and Roger’s youngest son, but that son was now away at college, and Linda and Roger themselves were starting to have more allergy troubles as they got older.

Politely but firmly, I resisted Linda’s sales pitch, saying that even without Bocca, we still had two other cats, and that was enough – plus, after Bocca’s loss, we were leery of taking in a cat who was thought to be twelve or thirteen years old, the same age Bokey had been: what if Jackson were to die within months of coming to live with us? We didn’t want to take the risk.

My refusal prompted Roger and Linda to cast their nets more widely by posting a large picture of Jackson on a bulletin board at school, along with a note supposedly from Jackson, asking someone to adopt him. Because the picture and note had been hung right by our school mailboxes, we saw Jackson’s plea on a daily basis – and every day, his beseeching eyes wore down a little more of our resistance, until one day we cracked, and said all right, yes, we’d take him.

In addition to being haunted by those beseeching eyes, we couldn’t miss the fact that Jackson looked almost exactly like our dearly departed Bocca. Was it a sign? Had we found a substitute that could fill the sweet-faced-tiger-cat void in our hearts?

Though the bulletin board picture showed us that Jackson resembled Bokey physically, it also showed us that he couldn’t have an identical temperament, because there was no way we could’ve taken Bokey to a professional photographer and gotten him to pose charmingly in a basket, since he was terrified of people in general. When we met Jackson, however, he greeted us with pleasant equanimity, and during the years that he was ours, he reacted with similar equanimity any time guests were over.

Unfortunately, while Jackson warmed up to us easily enough, he was less quick to warm up to our other two cats. I’m not sure whether it was the sweetness of his nature, the fact that he’d been declawed, or a combination of the two, but it was clear that he’d never be the alpha cat in our household. If feeling threatened, he might hiss, growl, and sputter, but his fight-or-flight instinct leaned strongly toward the latter. We rarely witnessed actual altercations, and when we did, we’d break them up; even so, we’d occasionally feel scabs on his head from where one of the others had taken a swipe (or multiple swipes) at him. And I’m fairly sure it was about six months before I ever saw him asleep. I mean, he must’ve slept at some point, because I don’t think he could’ve survived otherwise … but only after half a year or so did I see him relax enough to close his eyes and curl up on the couch. Up until then, he spent almost all of his time crouching warily on the entryway rug.

To our relief, Jackson eventually became more comfortable in our home, and began sleeping on my pillow, lounging on the sun-warmed window seat, and trotting downstairs to greet us when we’d walk through the door. Of course, he’d often then make a halfhearted attempt to get out through that same door, which prompted us to start hailing him with the words “Back, beast!” Thankfully, these escape attempts were never earnest enough to succeed, because we had no intention of letting this former stray get back out on the mean streets of Cuyahoga Falls. According to Linda, he’d gotten out once when he lived with them, but that had been an accident: he’d pushed against a screen in a second-story window, and the screen hadn’t been firmly in place, causing Jackson to fall to the ground and break his leg. Found and treated in time, he suffered no long-term effects from the injury. Linda had called him a survivor.

He’d not only survived but thrived. Roger and Linda had had him for over a decade, and he was already an adult when they adopted him; nonetheless, this senior citizen kitty seemed to show no signs of old age. We joked that he must have found the “one ring” that had kept Tolkien’s Bilbo the hobbit so well preserved; we joked, too, that he’d outlive us both – which seemed particularly likely when his love of winding around our ankles caught us off guard and threatened our balance, including on the stairs (“Jackson, you’re not on our insurance policy!” was Matthew’s frequent refrain).

Despite the tripping hazard Jackson sometimes presented, we enjoyed his youthful spirit and playful ways. Every morning during colder weather, when Matt would sit on the stairs to put on his boots, he’d call out, “Jackson – bootlaces!” Jackson would come running to spend a couple minutes batting at the dangling strings that Matt would wave above him. Besides enjoying playing with Jackson, Matt also liked to play him: when he’d pick Jackson up and put him over his shoulder, he’d then give Jackson a gentle squeeze; initially, this was just meant as a friendly hug, but since each squeeze would elicit a “mrrowww,” Matt would start squeezing him in the rhythm of a song, which made it sound as if Jackson were singing. We called this “playing the cat-pipes.”

In addition to his playfulness, another way in which Jackson didn’t act his age was that he certainly had the voracious appetite more commonly associated with youth, especially when it came to canned cat food, which we typically give the cats shortly before we eat dinner. However, Jackson’s internal clock seemed more of the twenty-two- or twenty-three-hour variety, because he usually started his vociferous yowling whenever anyone came home in the afternoon – a tendency that occasionally got him banished to an upstairs room for a spell, until it was feeding time. (Now that he’s gone, we haven’t always remembered to give the cats their canned food, so I guess his rather strident reminders were more needed than we realized!)

Perhaps one reason Jackson was always so hungry was that he wasn’t always able to keep the food down. Soon after we took him in, we heard him make a strange noise, kind of like “Mmwowwwowwwoww!” “What a funny sound,” we remarked – just before he vomited copiously on the window seat. The next time we heard it, or heard the more common “Huckahuckahucka” sound, we knew to move him off the furniture or area rug, stat.

Puking proclivities notwithstanding, Jackson seemed the picture of health otherwise, so we assumed he was getting his needed nutrients. About a year ago, though, Jackson must have taken off his “one ring” that had kept him ageless, because we started noticing that he’d gone from slim and trim to scrawny. Petting him, we could feel his spine. This past winter, he took up a new habit: hunkering by our heaters. We told ourselves, well, he’s old, and he doesn’t have a lot of fat to keep him warm, and it’s been a harsh winter, and it’s not as if he can go to Florida like the human elderly, so the heaters provide him with the comfort he craves. We folded up towels and placed them next to the heaters, so Jackson’s old bones could lie on something softer than the floor. Even so, he still came running at the call of “Bootlaces!” And he still kept clamoring for food to anyone unwise enough to come home before 5:00.

It was only a couple weeks before he died that his running and clamoring stopped, and we knew then that something more than old age was troubling him. Kidney disease, the vet said – the same thing that had claimed the life of his similarly striped predecessor, Bocca. Armed with an IV bag and a YouTube how-to video involving a Scottish Fold who’d been getting daily IV treatments for years, we hoped we might be able to preserve Jackson’s life for some months, at least. The first two or three days, Jackson’s response seemed promising, but by the end of the week, that promise was clearly not going to be fulfilled. His eyes had done what I remembered Bocca’s doing – and Macska’s, too, just a few months ago: they’d become smaller and more triangular, and appeared to be almost all black pupil.

I knew we might be nearing the end, but was alarmed nonetheless to come home from school on Friday afternoon to find my husband only partially succeeding in holding back tears as he told me he’d made Jackson’s final vet appointment for 5:15. Initially, I wondered if Matt was being unnecessarily hasty, but while I petted our kitty’s soft, stripy sides and wept, those stripes began trembling violently, and I realized that Matt had made the right decision.

When we agreed to let Jackson into our home and our hearts, we did so with some trepidation. Would this substitute kitty live long enough and be sweet enough to repay our emotional investment in him? Would the benefits of adopting an older cat be worth the pain of losing him? Six years later, the answer was a definite yes.

“Have you seen the cute picture of the tiger kitty in the office?” Meredith asked me as she walked into my office at work. I had not, and she encouraged me to check it out the next time I was in the office. I did, and I saw a very cute adult tiger cat, sitting in a basket, and he was up for adoption from a colleague who had developed allergies after many years of living with the cat. I agreed it was a cute photo, but we had two kitties at home, so I did not give much thought about him.

“I miss my tiger kitty,” Meredith commented at home. A few weeks before, we had to put our tiger cat, Bocca, to sleep because he had kidney failure. “Uh-huh,” was my non-committal answer. I admitted the house seemed emptier with only two kitties, but I did not think we needed another one so soon after Bocca had died.

Wrong. Over the next few days, Meredith became more insistent that we needed another tiger kitty, and so I found myself driving over with Meredith to my colleague’s house to meet Jackson, our new tiger kitty.

When we met him, he was wearing a little red bow around his neck. We were told that the adult son of the family had thought he should look nice for us. We went back to the kitchen to pick up a few left-over supplies, and when we went back to Jackson, he had managed to get his bow off. I was rather taken by that.

We got Jackson home and slowly introduced him to our other two cats. He did not take it well. He spent much of his time, those first few weeks, hunched into a little ball on our rug in the hallway. I do not know why he felt safe there, but he did.

Jackson eventually learned to co-exist with the other cats, but as a sweet-tempered and somewhat skittish cat, he was easily chased around by the other cats that we had over the last few years. They all seemed to sense that he would not fight back, and so he became the chase-toy often.

Jackson was sweet (we have a theory that all tigers are sweet), and he liked to be near me and Meredith. If we were on the couch or in bed, that is generally where you would find Jackson. He also always remained young-at-heart. We think Jackson was about 10 years old when he came to our home in the fall of 2009, and he lived another 7 years. During that entire time, he loved to play. This was especially true in the winter when I would put on my boots. He would come running from wherever he was so he could play with my boot laces. He did that up to within two weeks of when he died. In fact, when he stopped playing with my boot laces, I knew he was really sick.

Jackson was declawed in his front paws, but he still had his back claws. In fact, he could not fully draw them in. This could get your attention when he jumped into or out of your lap, but in general it was funny because he sounded like he was wearing tap shoes on our wooden floors – he clicked wherever he went.

Jackson was sweet, but the one place he would drive me crazy was in the kitchen. If I was in the kitchen in the afternoon or evening, Jackson would let me know in a loud voice that he wanted to eat. We usually fed the cats canned cat food around 5:00 in the evening, but as soon as I got home, be it 3:00 or 4:45, Jackson was sure to start reminding me that there was no food on the floor for him to eat.

Jackson absolutely loved having his ear scratched. I could dig in behind his ears and actually start to lift him off his front feet, and he would purr away and start to roll his eyes back in his head. If I stopped, he would often grab my hand with his paws and drag it to his head. He was not subtle.

Jackson died on Friday, March 20th, 2015 after making our home a little happier for five-and-a-half years. We lost our first cat, Mascka, back in November of 2014, and with Jackson dying in March, we lost our cats that liked to snuggle. We still have four cats, and they are good company. But, I, with Meredith, miss my tiger kitty.

Rest in peace, Jackson kitty!

“Three…two…one! Launch da kitty!” A grey ball of fluff was gently tossed a couple of feet down the hallway. When it landed on the floor, it ran down the hall into our living room, except when the rare whim veered him into the dining room instead. If you did not promptly leave the end of the hall, he would come trotting back down the hall to be launched again.

This is my deepest early memory of our first kitty, Macska. He arrived in our home and hearts in early September of 1998, and he recently had to be put to sleep on Saturday, November 1st, after 16 years of charming us utterly. What a wonderful cat.

Meredith and I were married in August of 1998, and we knew we wanted a couple of cats to make our home complete. Meredith was sure she could not handle the stress of picking out just one cat from the local non-kill shelter, so she sent her pre-marriage roommate with me to pick out two cats (one each). As Laura and I entered the Treehouse cat shelter, a woman was returning a three or four-month-old kitten because she was allergic. The kitten was a jaw-droppingly adorable grey long-haired kitten, and Laura gave him a long look.

We went around the shelter, and I fell in love with another kitty who came into our lives in October of that year, Bocca. Laura, after seeing all the kitties available for adoption, went back to get the long-haired grey kitten. When the woman had brought the kitten back in, she apologized to the receptionist; she was told not to worry – the kitten would not stay at Treehouse for long. I think it was about 20 minutes that he was there.

We took Macska home in a cardboard carrier and let him out once we were in our apartment in Chicago. He calmly wandered around and checked everything out. Meredith was smitten. Macska never did have a shy bone in his body.

I’m still not sure how the launch-da-kitty game got started. I suspect Macska was blocking the door one day and I gently tossed him aside and he took off running. He loved it, and so did we.
Everything that cat did was cute, and if any cat has ever understood the concept of “work it, baby!” it was Macska. He would flop in the middle of the floor, roll over on his back to expose his fuzzy tummy, tuck his paws up, tilt his head at an angle, and if he REALLY wanted to wow you he would let out a tiny mew. We called him our show cat, and for at least ten years he was. He loved people and wanted to be in someone’s lap if one was around. Whose lap changed from year to year – sometimes he favored me, especially when I was lying down on the couch, and sometimes he favored Meredith. Meredith was his clear favorite for the last several years of his life – she could not be on the couch without Macska being in her lap.

Some random memories about Macska:

He loved to lick metal and plastic. Odd, but true. We would sometimes be awakened by the sound of a cat licking the tub faucet. I think he liked the way it felt on his tongue.
He loved bread, and was known to tear into bread bags to get at it, so we could never leave it out. In much the same way, he loved cheese.

When he was a young cat, he liked to play tug-of-war with him on one end of a cat toy and me or Meredith on the other. We just called it “tug!”

When he was still a kitten, he somehow got up on to the top of Meredith’s bureau, then on to her dollhouse, where he curled up and went to sleep on the porch of the house.
For years later in his life, he like to be in Meredith’s lap when she was reading her Bible. We called him our “spiritual kitty.”

Early in his life, Macska was known to climb up in our artificial Christmas tree, bend a few branches to make a nest, and fall asleep in the tree.

Macska may or may not have been related to my sister-in-law’s cat, Earl. Earl looked almost the same as Macska, was about the same age, and was a found stray from the north side of Chicago.
After sixteen years, I still cannot reliably spell Macska (which is Hungarian for “cat”).

Macska was a very special kitty to us, and we are much sadder for his being gone. While our other kitties are all friendly and like to be near us, none of them is the consistent lap cat that Macska was, so we are reminded of his absence quite often. He was a dear kitty, and an amazing one, and I am deeply grateful we were able to enjoy his company for so long. Rest in peace, my dear kitty.

The Second-Choice Cat

– Memories of Macska –

(aka Poofling, Snug, Snag, Snug-o-let, Such Motchk, Frumple-baby, Snuggle-puddin’)

“This cat was my second choice,” explained my friend Laura as Matt set down the box containing our apartment’s newest resident. Laura had graciously volunteered to be my proxy at the animal shelter, since I was afraid that, surrounded by cute, beseeching felines, I’d feel obliged to adopt them all. Laura’s first choice had been an affectionate white female named Praline – but Praline had already been spoken for, and remained at the shelter only because she had a broken leg that hadn’t quite healed.

In lieu of Praline, Laura had selected a fluffy gray six-month-old kitten we named Macska (pronounced “Motch-ka”), the Hungarian word for “cat.” The name had been picked before its recipient; though after a year of teaching English at a school in Transylvania, I could still hardly form a complete sentence in Hungarian, I knew assorted vocabulary words, including those for a number of animals, and I thought “Macska” would be a good name for a cat, particularly a somewhat exotic-looking one.

At first, all I could see of Macska’s looks was a pinkish-gray nose with light beige fur on either side of it, as he sniffed the unfamiliar smells in our apartment. As soon as the box was opened, he hopped out, showing no fear – just plenty of curiosity about his new environment. I was smitten by the charms of this inquisitive little beast.

Granted, we may have been biased in claiming that Macska was World’s Cutest Cat, but besides having a striking appearance, he knew how to work it. Think Puss in Boots, from Shrek. He would lie on the floor, fluffy belly begging to be petted, and roll slowly onto his side, and then look up as if to see what effect his antics were having on his audience. At a science museum in San Francisco, we saw an exhibit on cuteness; it mentioned, among other factors, that people typically find creatures with unusually large, round eyes to be cuter than their more normal-eyed counterparts. Our perception of Macska’s cuteness now had some scientific data to back it up.

It was a multisensory cuteness, as well. Despite the fact that I’ve never actually felt the fur of an angora rabbit, I always said Macska’s long gray fur was “angora-soft,” because its extraordinary texture seemed to merit a distinctive modifier.   In addition to the tactile pleasure of stroking this angora-soft fur, petting Macska, even just once or twice, almost always activated a surprisingly loud purr, peaceful and soothing in its rhythmic rumble.

Most of Macska’s other habits were adorable as well. When we lived in Chicago, the door of our apartment opened into a long hallway that led to the living room. Sometimes, we’d be about to leave, and Macska would be curled up against the door, which led to a game we called “launch-the-kitty”: one of us would pick him up around the middle and swing him forward and backward while counting to three. On three, we’d release him, and he’d sprint down the hall and into the living room. He loved this game so much that if we didn’t get out the door efficiently, he’d sprint right back and block our egress in hopes that we’d launch him again. He was also a fan of tug-o’-war. We had a simple cat toy that was merely a long, colorful piece of fabric attached to a plastic stick. I think the intent was for owners to wave it around while cats would chase the end of the fabric … but Macska preferred to bite the end of the fabric and not let go, regardless of our gentle efforts to pull it away from him. Giving up on getting him to relinquish the fabric at our urging, we’d cry, “Tug!” and praise him for doing it so effectively.

Macska was as cute asleep as he was awake, especially when he’d cover his eyes with his paw. We called him the “meld-a-beast” for his seeming ability to become one with any comforter or rug or pillow on which he slept. Sometimes, he sought more offbeat naptime accommodations. On our dresser, we used to have a dollhouse, and when Macska wasn’t yet fully grown, the dollhouse’s second-story terrace, above its conservatory, proved a perfect place for a catnap. And of course, Macska loved the holidays, because it meant he could climb into our artificial Christmas tree and curl up around the trunk. Telltale tufts of gray fur in the flattened-down branches first clued us in, but occasionally, we’d find Macska himself blinking sleepily at us, apparently content in the knowledge that he was our favorite ornament.

Macska’s most enduringly endearing habit, however, was his penchant for lap-snuggling. We used to call him the Lap Slut, because he’d spend a bit of time with one of us, and then switch to the other, and then back again. More flatteringly, we also called him the Kitty Ambassador, because he wasn’t afraid of strangers, and would gladly snuggle in their laps too, if allowed, at times helping “dog people” to understand a bit better what made “cat people” tick. In recent years, Macska became the Spiritual Kitty, because of the regularity with which he’d join me in the morning as I sat on the couch reading my Bible or writing in my prayer journal.

Not all of Macska’s habits were cute. Some were just odd – like his licking fetish. He’d go through occasional stages during which he’d lick various surfaces, from the metal tub faucet to the plastic laundry baskets. For a while, he even liked to lick the wall at the head of our bed, though his doing so would get him shut out of the room. And then, more annoying than odd, was the way he sometimes chose to get our attention: by batting at our hands (on the couch) or heads (in bed), and, if this didn’t get the desired result (having someone pet him), he’d keep batting, but with his claws out.

The worst habits, though, were the ones Macska may not have been able to help. When he was only a few years old, he had some urinary problems. The good news was that they mostly went away when we gave him a special, vet-prescribed cat food. The bad news was that it’s pricey stuff, and we ended up feeding it to all our subsequently acquired cats too, rather than go through the constant hassle of trying to make sure they all got enough to eat without letting Macska eat the normal food or letting the others eat the special food.

Soon after we got the urinary problems under control, Macska began having intestinal problems as well. So we kept an eye on him, and if he started getting blocked up, we’d take him to the vet for an enema. This wasn’t fun for any of us, but seemed to be working … until the enemas were being needed more and more frequently, and we weren’t sure how often we could put him through this and still feel he had a decent quality of life. But then, at the vet’s suggestion, we tried giving him small, daily doses of a laxative powder available at the grocery store, sprinkling it in his moist food so he’d eat it. We’re pretty certain this prolonged his life by two or three years.

In fact, about three years ago, when those car-window stick-figure families started getting particularly popular, we thought it would be amusing to get one for ourselves, consisting of Matthew, me, and our (at the time) five cats. Not too long after that, we took in Cat Number Six – and yet we didn’t order a sixth cat sticker, because Macska’s health seemed precarious enough that we worried, on some level, that as soon as we got the sixth sticker, Macska would die.

Yet he hung on, and between the special food and the miracle laxative powder, Macska was in some ways healthier than he’d been as a middle-aged cat. Nonetheless, we couldn’t deny that he was getting older. Though he still seemed to have a decent appetite, he became progressively scrawnier, and while I continued to pet him along the sides, and to scritch his head and belly, I stopped petting his back, because it was too disturbing to feel his spine. “You’re just skin and bones!” we’d say, and then add, “Skin and bones – and fur and purr – and love.”

In the past couple years, Macska wasn’t grooming himself so well, either, and his long fur developed frequent lumps that needed to be cut or shaved. And his movements seemed stiff. He struggled a bit when jumping up to the couch or bed; and when jumping down, his back legs wouldn’t land quite right. We thought it was just arthritis.

We continued to think this until, about three weeks ago, Matthew saw Macska’s back half just buckle underneath him and fall over as he was trying to walk. Frightened, Matthew wondered if this was the end, but since Macska started moving more normally before long, we continued to tell ourselves it was probably just arthritis.

Problems returned, however, about a week later. Matthew took Macska to the vet and found that he had both a tumor and a heart problem, and to treat the former would mean exacerbating the latter. He also had a urinary tract infection, so the vet gave us some medication for that, and we hoped we could at least clear that up and make Macska more comfortable during his remaining months, or weeks.

But as it turned out, we didn’t have weeks. We didn’t even have one week. Over the next couple days, Macska stopped eating, and appeared to be moving less and less. We’d come home from work and find him in the exact same spot on the couch, with no evidence that he’d been elsewhere. We’d pick him up and set him in front of his food and water bowls. He’d drink some water, but would ignore the food. We’d then set him in the litter box, and nothing would happen, other than his attempting to leave it. So we’d put him back on the couch, where he’d change his position with evident difficulty.

By Friday night, we were talking about the possibility of having Macska euthanized, but despite his obvious illness, the decision itself was not so obvious to us. He was still drinking; wasn’t that a good sign? And he could still move, albeit not easily. And above all, he was still purring, still making that sweet sound suggesting contentment, tranquility, and love. His eyes, though – it was getting harder to look at his eyes. They’d become somehow smaller, yet the pupils appeared to have grown, so no longer were they round, alert, and greenish-gold; they were triangular, and black, and looking at them made something in my chest constrict.

So after Matthew went to bed on Friday, I stayed up for another half hour, gently stroking Macska’s head and sides, and weeping softly as I murmured repeatedly what a good kitty he was.

The next morning, Matthew called the vet’s office to make the appointment, his voice choking on the words. Come at 11:45, they told us. Three more hours. Three more hours to wait … but also three more hours to spend with Macska. We watched a movie, and Matthew put Macska in my lap. Partway through, we paused for a bathroom break, after which I insisted that Matthew should get a chance to hold him too. Macska acquiesced for a while, but though he’d seemed to like us both pretty equally for most of his life, there was no denying that, in recent years, he’d become a Mama’s kitty. After a short time on Matthew’s lap, this cat who had barely moved for several days struggled to his feet and lurched in my direction. Humbled by this show of devotion that seemed so undeserved on my part, I reached out to hold him for one final hour.

At the vet’s, a man sitting next to us said, “That’s a handsome cat.” At that point, it was hardly the truth, but it was kindly meant, and perhaps the man could still glimpse traces of how cute Macska had been in his prime. When I see strangers on the brink of tears, my own instinct is to keep my distance, but this man was unafraid to enter into our pain, and though I don’t remember exactly what he said, his quiet, sympathetic conversation provided welcome comfort.

And then we were called to go into the room. This was the first time we’d ever had a cat put to sleep, and I was startled by how quickly it happened. Sixteen years of “Tug!” and “Launch!” and laps and love, sixteen years of sharing our home and our hearts with this small, affectionate creature, and his life was snuffed out in about a minute, if that.

So now, for the first time in over two years, the sticker count on my car window is right. Five cats. The sticker count is right, but the atmosphere feels wrong. My lap is lonely in Macska’s absence. Sitting on the couch without a furry gray cat to anchor me, I sense, even subconsciously, both physically and emotionally, that something – someone – is missing.

I’ve wondered sometimes about that white cat, Praline, Laura’s first-choice cat at the shelter. Was she as sweet as she seemed? Did she bring her owner much joy? Likely she did, and I’d be glad of that. But for myself, I’m grateful that she’d already been claimed. Laura’s second-choice kitty turned out to be the perfect choice for us.