In December of 2012 we got our first cat, a six month old black cat that grabbed Jayme’s attention by being aggressively sweet at the cat rescue while she was searching for a cat to adopt. We named her Kenya, and she ended up being the sweetest little cat I’ve ever known. Maybe all cats are secretly that sweet with their owners, but I didn’t know before that, so I got unexpectedly converted from a dog person to a cat person. As she got older though I started to worry that being raised without other cats had caused her to forget how to interact with cats. She used to stare at other cats through the window for hours on end, but whenever she gets face to face with another cat she seems to just hiss at them and try to get away. I thought getting another cat would help her learn how to socialize with other cats again and so for that reason, and because a kitten sounded fun we had decided in 2017 to adopt a kitten. The problem was we had a 7 week trip planned and we didn’t want to get a kitten and then have to leave it for 7 weeks, so we decided to wait until we got back from our trip to find one. While Jayme and I were waiting for the trip we would talk about what kind of kitten to adopt, what color, but I was always nervous that adopting a kitten was risky because if it grew up to be an asshole cat, as many cats are, you are just basically stuck with an asshole living in your house for potentially 20 years. Unfortunately I know the pain of that first hand with a grumpy incontinent 13 year old Chihuahua that no one else wants residing with me for the last 13 years. So by the time we left on our 7 week trip at the end of October, we definitely wanted a kitten, but were fairly nervous of accidentally picking out an asshole.
After a quick 10 days in England, we started on our 3 week tour of Italy. We started in the South with Sicily, and planned to make our way up to central Italy and leave for Thailand from Rome. We spent a week in Sicily exploring, and then 4 days in Sassi which was an unbelievable town where all the businesses and houses are literally caves partially built into a mountain, and in both places we were pretty shocked at the sheer volume of cats wandering around the streets of Italy. Everywhere there were dozens and dozens of cats. They actually mostly looked healthy and happy and we were missing Kenya so we spent a ridiculous amount of time playing (or trying to play) with all the stray cats everywhere. After leaving Sassi we drove across Italy to our next destination, the Amalfi Coast, specifically a small town along the coast called Ravello.
We got to our Airbnb at night, which was a cute little house along a small lemon orchard on a hill overlooking the water. The town was pedestrian only, and we had to park about a mile away and walk to the town square, and then walk another 10 minutes down a bunch of stairways to get to our house. We went out for a quick dinner in town to the only place that was open, and then just stayed in for the night.
The next morning we stayed at our house through the morning so we could start a load of laundry. It was noon by the time we finally left, and we decided to go to the town square to find lunch. In the town square there were two restaurants that used the middle of the plaza as their outdoor seating area, and under the tables were at least 15 cats roaming around the tables searching for scraps. So far in Italy seeing 1–2 cats was normal at an outdoor seating area, but normally they just stayed nearby rather than being under the tables. We were surprised at how many cats were in this town, they seemed to be everywhere. At a smaller restaurant in the corner of the same square they had a couple of outdoor tables and this restaurant seemed to be where the kittens hung out. There were 6–7 kittens lounging and searching for scraps by this restaurant. Jayme always gets the most excited about the kittens so we stopped there to see them. Most of them seemed healthy, a couple of them had eye infections so that one of their eyes were sealed shut, and one tiny black fluffy kitten had an eye infection in both eyes and both eyes were completely sealed shut. He looked to be in such bad shape that the actual first words I said were, “Oh, that one’s going to die soon.” We got a little bummed out by seeing the kittens with eye infections, but there didn’t seem like there was anything we could do, so we didn’t stay long.
We needed to find a place for lunch, and the town was small enough to walk around the whole thing in 10 minutes, so we started searching for a good place for a quick lunch. We walked to one end of town and didn’t find anything, and while walking back on the walkway we see the same fluffy black blind kitten. He was walking directly down the middle of the busy walkway with his nose to the ground sniffing around trying to find food, but was nowhere near anything. I picked him up out of the way of people walking, and moved him to a less busy place, but we didn’t have any food or anything to give him so we left him and went to lunch at a sandwich place nearby. I was really curious if there was something we could do and Jayme started to get pretty emotional about helping him as well. During lunch I found an article on my phone that explained how to clear away all the gunk out of a kitten’s eyes when it gets so bad they seal shut. Based on the article it seemed quite difficult, required many specific supplies, and was extremely risky and dangerous to do so I didn’t think it would be a good idea to even try to clean his eyes. Jayme saved a few chunks of cheese from her sandwich in a napkin, and after lunch we left with the goal of giving the scraps to a couple of the sick kittens, and especially the black one with both eyes sealed shut. We ended up searching all over the town and couldn’t find him anywhere. We tried to give a piece of cheese to one of the other kittens with an infected eye, but it made no effort to eat it. Finally we gave up trying to find the little black one and just started walking back to our Airbnb, and were planning on giving the cheese to the first cat we came upon that seemed like they were hungry.
On the way back, at the other end up of the plaza, hidden behind the stairs to the cathedral we found the little black one still sniffing around trying to find food. Jayme gave him a chunk of cheese and he practically attacked it he ate it so voraciously, she gave him another chunk and this time he actually did bite down on her thumb so hard she started bleeding slightly. We then carefully fed him the rest of the cheese, and he ate each piece savagely and clearly wanted a lot more. After feeding him the cheese, Jayme really wanted to bring him back to our Airbnb to try our best to clean his eyes, and even though the article made this seem like a very bad idea, I figured we probably couldn’t make his prospects and situation worse. I thought we may even be able to help him a little bit and give him a fighting chance, so I agreed we could bring him back to try to clear his eyes, and feed him a full meal at the very least. Jayme picked him up to carry him back, and right when she stood all the way up, he squirmed and fought so hard that he jumped free and fell all the way to the concrete ground. Luckily he wasn’t hurt, and I grabbed him and held him securely by the scruff of the neck. We decided Jayme should go try to find cat food first and bring it back, and I would take him directly back to our Airbnb. He kept squirming and fighting whenever I held him any other way, so I had to carry him all the way back to our Airbnb holding him out by the scruff of his neck while getting some weird looks along the way.
Jayme was able to search all the possible stores for cat food pretty quickly, and got back a few minutes after me empty handed. I had just barely got him set up with a little bed in the bathroom made from a towel and drinking water in a cup when she got home. We had no food for him, no litter or litter box, and no equipment or supplies to somehow get his eyes open that were sealed so bad that it really looked like a solid scab on each eye. But we had decided we were going to try so we used dishcloths and warm water and just kept dabbing at one eye, rinsing the cloth, dabbing at the eye, rinsing the cloth and repeating over and over again until finally I saw the tiny sliver of one corner of his eye. I was surprised as I had been pessimistic about our prospects of getting his eyes opened after reading that article. Encouraged by the progress we kept up the process, switch back and forth between eyes, until we finally were able to clear enough of the dried gunk off that he could open both eyes. He couldn’t open his eyes all the way, but enough that he could definitely see for the first time in who knows how long. Once his eyes were open he immediately just started purring and wanting to cuddle with us. Almost immediately he crawled in Jayme’s lap and just fell asleep.
We had to create a makeshift litter box using a baking pan and filled with dirt that I dug using a screwdriver to loosen the dirt and my hands to dig it up and scoop it into the pan. Amazingly as soon as we set down his “litter box” in the bathroom he knew what to do with it. We still had the problem of nothing for him to eat and we needed something other than warm water to clean his eyes with, so I set back off into town to search for what we needed. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find cat food anywhere because Jayme had already looked, but I thought maybe I could find a deli and buy some sardines or something similar that he could eat. I walked around the entire town though and every place that possibly sold something a cat could eat was closed, and I couldn’t find single thing. I wanted to find Neosporin or something similar to put on his eyes, but I hadn’t seen it at any of the general stores, and the only pharmacy in town was closed until 4:30 PM. The only thing I found was a bottle of Hydrogen Peroxide, which some articles online said was a good solution to clean the outside of a cats eyes if they have an eye infection, and other articles that said the cat could immediately go blind from the hydrogen peroxide; my quest wasn’t that successful.
Luckily though back at the Airbnb Jayme had found an old box of dry cat food in an outdoor shed, and the little guy had been eating the kibble heartily. Since it was the only thing we had I decided to risk it and carefully clean his eyes with the hydrogen peroxide, and he didn’t go blind so I guess I did a good job. After I had cleaned his eyes he just laid on his back in my lap and stared up at me with his little halfway open eyes. I realized then that we couldn’t just put him back out into the cold just yet, and at the very least we needed to keep him with us for the remaining 4 nights we were staying in Ravello. One problem we had then was our Airbnb did not allow pets, and the owner of the house was coming over that evening to cook us a lemon pasta dinner and have dinner with us.
The owner wasn’t arriving until 7pm and it was 4 then, so we had a few hours. Our plan was to wait until after 4:30 PM when the pharmacy would open back up, go buy Neosporin, clean his eyes and apply the Neosporin, then carry his bed (towel) and his litter box (baking pan filled with dirt) and him the mile to our rental car, and leave him in the car while the owner is over and pretend we don’t secretly have a cat living there. When we got to the pharmacy it was still closed and there was a note in Italian that I didn’t bother translating before that says the pharmacy is actually closed for several weeks. There was another pharmacy about 35 minutes away, but we would be cutting it really close if we drove that far so we weren’t sure what to do. We decided as a first step Jayme would go to some of the stores that were closed earlier to check if they sold Neosporin, and I would walk to get the car and come back to the pharmacy to pick her up if we did need to drive somewhere. When we reconvened Jayme did not find Neosporin anywhere, but she did talk to the shopkeeper and he told her there is another pharmacy only a 5 minute drive away that wasn’t listed online, and I had researched online and found out the Italian brand name for Neosporin is Streptosil. So we were off to the the next town over in pursuit of Streptosil because we had heard that they had a secret unlisted pharmacy. Luckily the rumors were true and there was indeed a pharmacy, and we got what we needed. Streptosil obtained, we then hurried home, cleaned his eyes, applied the streptosil, fed him, erased any sign that he had been there, and hustled off to the car to put him in the back. By the time we got back to the house the owner was already waiting by the door for us. He made a delicious dinner, and I had a great time talking with him, but honestly I couldn’t wait for him to finally leave so we could go get the little guy out of the back of the car.
We were still planning to let him go back where we found him when we left the town so I didn’t want to give him a bath or trim his claws yet because I didn’t want to alter his scent to other cats or lessen his ability to defend himself. He wasn’t stinky, but he had been a street cat his entire life and he was pretty dirty so I was hesitant about letting him lay on me. He was relentless though and would just keep trying to cuddle over and over again. The first few days we had him he would get energized if he thought we were going to feed him, but otherwise he just wanted to cuddle, and he would crawl up on me and find the perfect spot to take a nap. At the time we thought that was just his personality. That he wasn’t very high energy and just liked cuddling all day long. Before long he would start getting more energy and playing, so he must have just been so sick still that he didn’t have any energy to play, but it was during these first few days when he was such a sweet cuddler all the time that we really fell in love with him.
The day after the dinner with the Airbnb owner we went to a grocery store in another town and upgraded some of his supplies. We bought him fresh new food and litter (though we used the baking pan as his box for the entire time we were there). We kept applying the Neosporin to his eyes 4 times per day. His eyes would get fairly goopy between cleanings, but they did seem to be actually improving slightly. To try to figure out his age we used my luggage scale that we used to make sure we were below airline weight restrictions, and put him in a plastic bag and weighed the bag. Based on his weight (2 lbs/ 0.9 kg) he was supposed to be about 6 weeks old, and I looked at a chart of cat appearances by age and he looked like the 6 week old cat so we thought he must be 6 weeks old. We also weren’t sure if he was a male or female, but thought he seemed more like a boy so always referred to him as he.
Just out of curiosity in the next couple of days I emailed a pet transport company to see the process of transporting a kitten to Seattle. Since we were legitimately looking for a new kitten anyway I was hoping we could just drop him off with them before we leave Italy, they would ship him to Seattle for a few hundred bucks, and we could get someone in Seattle to take care of him until we got back from Thailand. They got back to me and turns out the price of the shipping is a minimum of $1800, plus they have to have their rabies shot for at least 21 days before traveling, and they cant get their rabies shot until they are 16 weeks old. Our little guy was apparently 6 weeks old, so he would have to wait 10 more weeks to get a rabies shot, then wait another 21 days before he could be shipped, plus $1800 just to ship him to Seattle. I had no idea where we would possibly leave a 6 week old street kitten for 13 weeks in Italy other than maybe at a long term boarding facility. Again just out of curiosity I emailed all the cat boarding facilities in Rome to ask if they would board kittens, and if they could watch them long term. It seemed like an almost impossible task, but at the same time though he was so sweet and we were having so much fun with him the idea of just leaving him where we found him started seeming harder and harder to accept. One of the facilities I emailed replied and said they did board kittens, but they required them to have their vaccines first so that didn’t seem like it would work out.
We reached out to a few people we knew to see if we could find anyone in Italy that could help us with the situation. We messaged my aunt, who has been involved in international cat rescue before and has a network of cat lovers, my former Zillow co-worker, who grew up in Italy and still has family in Rome, and a few other people that had some sort of connection to Italy or cat adoption that we thought might be able to connect us to someone that could help. There were a handful of cat adoption groups in Italy on Facebook that we messaged to ask if there was anyone that could help us. We even messaged the owner of the Airbnb and told him we ‘might’ adopt a kitten from the streets and wondered if we did if he knew anyone that we could pay to take care of the kitten until it was old enough to be transported. We were getting pretty deep with this cat, but still didn’t have a plan yet. We decided to take him to the nearest vet the next day. We tried to find one that spoke English but could only really gauge this by who answered the phone, and we found a vet about an hour away in Salerno that we thought spoke some English. Our plan was to see if anything panned out with all the messages we sent out, and to wait and find out what we learned at the vet before making any decisions. Oh and somewhere around the second or third day with him we decided we couldn’t think of a better name for our little guy than Ravello, since we found him in the town square of Ravello.
Our attempt to find an English speaking vet failed; I don’t think he spoke or understood a single word of English. What we did was use my phone as an English to Italian translator and used Jayme’s phone as an Italian to English translator and gave Jayme’s phone to the vet and he would type messages in Italian and use Google to translate it to English, and I would respond by typing in English in my phone and using Google to translate to Italian. It was a very long and very frustrating process, made extra frustrating by the spotty cell service that would lose connection every third message and we would lose whatever message was trying to be translated. Sometimes the vet would spend 5 minutes on a message, try to translate it to English, and lose connection and his entire message would be gone and he would have to retype it all. Thankfully he was very nice and patient through it all. We ended up spending at least 45 minutes in his office passing the phones back and forth but we learned a few things, and had a plan.
Turns out Ravello was just small for his age, and he was actually 12 weeks old. I had found out cats could technically get their rabies shot at 12 weeks old so I asked if he could give it to him, but he said he couldn’t today because of his eye infection, but he gave us eye drops and told us to give him eye drops twice a day every day, and in 4 days he could get the rabies vaccine. He also said he was positive for parasites, gave him de-worming medicine, gave him his first set of shots, gave him flea treatment, and confirmed he was a boy (so Ravella was no longer a possibility). So while the first vet visit wasn’t a total success because he didn’t give him the rabies shot he needed to start the countdown of when he could get shipped to Seattle, our situation started looking a little better. At 12 weeks old, and us able to get him his rabies shot before we leave Italy, all we need to do is find someone that can take care of him for less than 3 weeks, and then the pet transport company will pick him up to ship him to Seattle. Shouldn’t be too hard.
After we had a plan with the vet visit, and a few leads on where we could leave him for 3 weeks we dropped the pretenses and decided that we were just going to either bring him back to Seattle with us, or find a permanent home for him in Italy where he would be safe. We would do whatever it took to make sure one of those happened. Since we knew we weren’t going to just release him back on the street we finally gave him a bath and clipped his claws. Clean and nice smelling we were able to ramp up the cuddling considerably and little Ravello sucked us in even more. *Jayme’s note: I was so excited to have him sleep with us, but kept waking up in the middle of the night worrying I would roll over on him since he was so small.* We heard back from my former co-worker, who connected me to her brother who knew someone that might be able to help. We talked to her, and she agreed to take care of him for the 20 days between when we dropped him off and then the pet transport company could pick him up to be shipped home. If only it ended up being that easy, but for a few days we thought we had a plan in place. We enjoyed a last couple days on the Amalfi coast and then packed up the with Ravello and headed North to the Roman countryside city of Frascati.
Frascati is in wine country about 40 minutes outside of Rome. We were staying in a small bed & breakfast/ wine resort. Their main business is operating vineyards and a winery, but they also have a handful of rooms they rent out in a converted country house. Luckily they allowed pets, and even though they assumed we were bringing a dog when we told them we needed to add a pet to our reservation, they were welcoming of little Ravello. The business was owned by a retired European Space Agency scientist who bought a winery for fun after his retirement, and quickly turned it into one of the most award winning wineries in Italy. He was basically the Walter White of wine I think. His daughter managed the business, and luckily she spoke fluent English as she had lived in NYC for several years. They had a dog and a cat running around the winery and she gave us the name of the English speaking veterinarian she used as Ravello needed to go back in. We called and made an appointment for the day the previous vet told us Ravello would be able to get his rabies shot. Everything seemed to be going according to plan, but the only concern was despite us giving him the prescription eye drops twice per day his eyes actually seemed to be getting worse again after they had been improving daily since we found him.
When we got to the vet we learned that while she did speak some English it was limited, and it was not exactly easy to communicate with her. That said, she spoke much more than the previous vet. Right away she burst our bubble and told us she felt strongly that he was still too sick to get a rabies vaccine, and it would be at least another 10 days before he could get the shot. She looked at the documentation from the first vet and told us that he had prescribed steroid eye drops and they were really not the ideal kind to be giving him, and that explained why his eyes had been getting worse over the last few days. She told us to throw that away, and instead gave us a prescription antibiotic cream for his eyes, and an oral antibiotic to take. According to her he had to finish his 10 day cycle of antibiotics before he could get the rabies vaccine. This was a big problem for us as we were leaving Italy for Thailand in 4 days and I wasn’t sure if the person who had agreed to take care of him during the 21 day waiting period would also be willing to take him back to the vet to get his rabies vaccine, and then keep him for 21 days after that. She was willing to bend the rules a bit and told us if we came back to her once he finished his antibiotics she would back date the rabies certificate to make it look like he had actually received the vaccine on the day we originally brought him in. This way he didn’t have to wait so long after the shot until he could be transported. But that meant that someone would have to bring him all the way back to Frascati after we had left, and since the person who had agreed to take him was in Rome I doubted she would be willing to come down to Frascati to get the vaccine. She asked us to bring in a fecal sample the next day so she could test for parasites and sent us on our way.
I immediately messaged the friend of my former co-worker’s brother who had agreed to take care of him to ask if she could possibly also just take him to a vet after he finished his medicine, but she said she couldn’t do that. I then had the idea that if she could just take care of him for a week, and then for the vaccine I could then have a pet boarding place come pick him up and keep him for the remaining 21 days. That way she would only have to take care of him for a week instead of the 21 days she had agreed to, but she would have to take him to get his vaccine. Unfortunately she said she just couldn’t do it, and we were back to square one.
The pet boarding facility we spoke to required his vaccines before they would take him, and we couldn’t find anyone that would take him to the vet to get his vaccines once he finished his medicine. We went on another messaging spree; sending messages to all the Italy and Rome Facebook groups we could find related to cat rescue, resending messages to everyone we had before, and emailing all the cat rescues offering them a significant amount of money if they could take care of him. At this point we were willing to settle for just finding him a safe place to stay permanently in Italy if we couldn’t find a way to coordinate everything to get him shipped. Nothing was panning out though. I was very surprised no one was willing to take care of him for a month and get him his rabies shot. I was offering to pay $1000, but we still had no takers (Sidenote: if anyone is ever offering $1000 to take care of a kitten for a month in the Seattle area give them my name because it seems like easy money). We were thinking about begging the lady that ran the winery if she could take care of him until he could be transported, but she already had animals and was very busy so I wanted to avoid that if at all possible. We were leaving Italy in 3 days, but realistically if we couldn’t find somewhere for him we were probably just going to skip our flight and stay in Rome until we could find somewhere for him, and either delay or cancel the Thailand part of our trip. I desperately did not want to do that, but time was running out and we didn’t have any good options.
The next day was Thanksgiving, and nothing had come of any of our attempts to find a place for him. At this point I was not enjoying myself at all because I was so stressed out about what to do. I tried again messaging cat sanctuaries and rescues, and messaging some of the people that were offering advice to see if they had any ideas, but still nothing was coming together. Around midday Jayme took Ravello back to the vet to bring in his fecal sample to be tested and I stayed at our room to continue working on finding a solution. I was running out of ideas so I took a shower and just sat on the floor with my head in my hands thinking about what to do. Suddenly I got the idea that the pet transport company and the cat boarding place I had messaged a week earlier while still in the Amalfi coast were businesses, and if I offered them enough money they might be willing to change their rules about only boarding cats after they have received their vaccines. So I jumped up and emailed both of them with the most desperate plea letter I could muster begging them to help us out.
Jayme got back from the vet shortly after, and she told me that she had further explained our situation to the vet and the vet had given her the name of an elderly lady that lived in Frascati that might be able to help. We now had three open possibilities again, and some hope that we might be able to actually figure something out. For the rest of the day we just stayed around the resort playing with Ravello as much as we could. By this time he had started getting better and his true rambunctious playful personality was finally coming through. We bought him some toys at a pet shop in Frascati and he would play with us non-stop for hours.
Around 4pm we were doing a winery tour and a wine and olive oil tasting at the place we were staying. Just before the tour started we received an email from the elderly lady the vet thought might be able to help, and she told us that she would not be able to take care of Ravello. One possibility was closed, but I still had emails out to Bliss (the pet transport company) and the boarding facility so there was still hope. About halfway through the tour Bliss emailed me back with amazing news. They told me they had talked to their manager and they worked with a boarding facility that would be willing to take care of him even without his shots. The facility even had a vet onsite so they could get him all his vaccines and get him his final pet health export certificate needed to be shipped out of Italy. According to the email though I needed to get him a microchip immediately and send them the microchip information before they could finalize the details. The moment I read that I just turned and left the tour and walked back to our room so I could call the vet to ask her if she could implant a microchip. The vet couldn’t seem to understand a word I was saying though so I walked to the main winery building and asked the owner (the Walter White of wine) if I could use his phone to call the vet back. Even with his phone on a good network she still couldn’t understand a word I was saying. The owner saw me struggling so he generously offered to talk to her. I explained to him that I needed to get a microchip implanted immediately, and if she could do it. He translated to her, and after some difficulty it was finally concluded that she could indeed implant a microchip. It only took a minute so no appointment was needed, but to her understanding the microchip could only be registered to an Italian resident so she wasn’t if we would be able to register it without an Italian address. I figured that wasn’t a big deal, and I could just make up an Italian address if I really needed to, but I emailed Bliss back and asked what I should do.
By then the tour had just ended and I met up with them just in time to start the fun part of the tour with the wine and olive oil tasting. While tasting some of the best wine and olive oil in the world paired with amazing locally cured meats and cheeses I received an email back from Bliss saying that she would do me a favor and register the microchip to her personal address, but in that case to just wait until we drop him off at the facility and the onsite vet would implant the microchip. She sent along a 15 page contract, and said once we signed everything and sent it along with a deposit we would be settled and we would finally officially have an actual plan of how to get our little boy home. Near the end of the tasting I also received a reply back from the original pet boarding facility I emailed, and he said he could also take Ravello and could get him his rabies vaccine. His email was borderline incomprehensible the English was so bad with no grammar while Bliss was uber professional with perfect English and long official contracts. Plus Bliss was accredited by an international organization while the boarding facility was not. Since we already had a solid plan in place I didn’t even reply to his email.
After the rest of the group was gone, and it was just us left at the winery (since we were actually staying there) we asked the owner and his daughter if they could print the contract for us and scan it back so we could email it to Bliss. They printed everything, and we sipped tea with them while Jayme filled out the contracts and the Walter White of wine regaled me with stories of his days in the space agency and his contribution to launching some of the first satellites and exploring space. After finally completing their insanely long contract, scanning it and sending it back to Bliss we could finally exhale and relax. Just as we were leaving back to our room the daughter mentioned that there was a pizza restaurant that would deliver there if we were interested. That sounded like an absolutely wonderful Thanksgiving dinner, so we had her order pizza, and we retired back to our room. We opened a bottle of their delicious wine and had an incredible dinner in our room. After dinner we video chatted my Grandma and Aunt and showed off our new sweet boy now that we were sure we could bring him home. All in all it was an amazing Thanksgiving, and I could have cried I was so happy a plan had come together.
The next morning we went back to the vet for the third time in three days to get the results of the parasite test. The good news was they were negative, so the first treatment was effective. While we were talking to her it was clear she was irritated with us and she suddenly let out “You are making me crazy!” I really have no idea what we did to “make her crazy”, as we paid for all of the services she provided to us, and I thought she was happy to help us do something extremely difficult in a foreign country where we didn’t speak the language. Apparently not. We left right after that though and enjoyed our last full day in Frascati as we were flying to Thailand the next day. We spent the day going to different wineries in the area toting Ravello in the car, exploring and doing wine tastings, and just hanging out with him as much as we could. Now that I could finally relax and enjoy myself we had a great time.
Our flight was at 9:30 PM the next day, and we wanted to spend as much time with Ravello as possible so we scheduled to drop him off at the Bliss boarding facility at 4:30 PM. They closed at 5, so we were getting there just before they closed and then would head off straight to the airport as we needed to be there by 6:30. We didn’t end up getting there until 4:45, and we hauled him and all his gear into the office. The lady that we were supposed to meet wasn’t there, and the lady that was there instead hardly spoke any English. We gave her his medicine and the instructions of how and when to apply it, but she just really didn’t seem to be paying attention. Then she took us out to the building where the cats are boarded.
From the second we walked in it was obvious it was not a good place. It was basically a big barn with probably 20 chain link cages on each side with an aisle down the middle. The building was not heated, and the top of the walls underneath the ceiling were exposed to the outside. This was late November, and he would be here until the end of December at least so it was going to be very cold with no heat in the building. Even though it was a large building with 40 cages there was not a single other cat in any of them, so he would be the only animal in the whole building. She showed us the cage for him and it was filthy. The concrete floor was covered with animal hair, dirt, a bunch of dead bugs, and there was literally a snake skin in the cage. Within the cage the paint was also peeling off the wall so there were paint chips all over the cage. The worst part was that in each cage there was a hole at the bottom that led to the middle aisle for drainage so they could clean the cages by just hosing them down. The holes wouldn’t have been a problem for an adult cat, but Ravello was so small that he easily could have fit through the holes. Right outside the building there many large dogs loudly barking as they were primarily a dog boarding facility. Being a street cat Ravello was intensely afraid of dogs and I had no doubt that he would escape through the holes and then who knows what would happen. The lady there even agreed he could fit through the holes and went outside to gather rocks to put in the holes to block them, but I knew a motivated cat could easily move them if he really wanted. I was fairly certain if we left him here we wouldn’t ever see him again.
Jayme called our contact at Bliss we had been working with and between crying and getting mad told her the facility was unacceptable and they needed to figure out another solution immediately as we had a plane to catch in a couple of hours. I was so frustrated about the situation that I punched the concrete wall bruising my knuckles (yes yes, not a good look, I know). Meanwhile Ravello was just running around playing with all the fun dead bugs. The lady at Bliss said she would call her manager and see if there was anything they could do, and we were basically having a total meltdown as the lady kept going in and out bringing in more rocks to block the hole. She called back after a few minutes and said there was nothing they could do, that this was the only facility available, and that was just how all cat boarding facilities were in Italy. I took the phone and explained again that even if we were OK with everything else the holes in the cage were simply unsafe and he would definitely escape if we left him there, but she just repeated that there was nothing she could do. I got off the phone and was at a loss for what to do.
Then I remembered that I had emailed that one other facility, and they had responded and said they could take care of him, and even though I had rudely not responded to his email maybe that was still a possibility. I pulled up their website, and Jayme called them. They said that their cages had heaters, they had other cats there currently, and they could take him if we brought him there tonight, but they closed at 6 PM and it was already 5:20 PM. Rome is a gigantic city and we had no idea how far away we were or even if we would get there in time so we immediately grabbed Ravello and all his stuff and sprinted out to the car telling the lady while running that we were going somewhere else. We were in such a hurry that we forgot that we left all his medicine in the office, but as we were driving away the lady very kindly came running out with it and handed it to us through the window and we were off. Luckily it turned out that the other facility was actually only 8 minutes away so we got there just after 5:30.
The other facility, called Casa Rita, was a lot better, but still not really great. Each of their cages was halfway open to the outside, and halfway under cover. Between the sections was a hanging plastic sheet that you or a cat could push open to get in or out. In the inside section there was a heater, but they only turned it on from 7pm to 7am, but he was a tough street kitten so I figured that would be OK. I didn’t see any obvious escape routes as the cages were just made from concrete and chain link, so we felt a lot better about leaving him there. Plus there were other cats there, and they had a dedicated person taking care of the cats that seemed to care for the animals. This facility ended up being even more expensive than the already expensive previous facility, but since we had no other options we paid the deposit. Jayme was getting pretty emotional by this point, and crying off and on while we were there.
We gave them his medicine and instructions, and then took Ravello out to his new home for the next 30–40 days. By this time we needed to get going to the airport so we quickly set up his litter box and food in the outside section, hugged and kissed him goodbye and left. I had backed all the way down the driveway when I got worried that maybe he wouldn’t know how to push his way through the plastic sheet and he would be stuck in the inside section while his water and litter box was on the outside. So I drove back up, and snuck back to their facility to show him how to push his way through the sheet if I needed to, but when I got close I saw him standing on his back paws against the chain link fence in the outside section loudly crying so he had clearly figured it out. I went back to the car and didn’t tell Jayme he was crying, but just said he had figured it out. Next stop was the airport, and we arrived just in time.
