#317 My Little Sister Cheryl, Winston Salem

We went by Tanglewood in Winston-Salem to kind of visit with my sister for about a week.

I'm really quite close with Cheryl the youngest and Sheila the oldest and I just enjoy their company quite a bit.

We would get together and catch a movie or go out to dinner or just this at and the other and hang out.

At some point we talked about maybe doing some sort of a sprinkler system that will automatically water her yard because she had just had a lot of work done and some of the sod had it already died.

During the winter prior to this in December I had stayed with her for two weeks as she healed up from a foot surgery. At some point, I had aerated her yard and spread a lot of grass seed.

All of the ryegrass came up but the fescue had died that kind of was a drag.

In the spring she had called a guy to talk about yard possibilities and he sort of convinced her to just redesign the whole thing and not plant a whole lot of grass but just create a terrace. They used lots of mulch and rocks and pretty stuff and she went with that method and its really looks good.

We needed to work with city water as its not like she has one of those irrigation wells or anything, it's not that big of a project.

There was a system and where you screw onto your existing hose spigot and it gives you 4 outputs that are on a timer. You can pick a time of day and a duration for each of four zones and I thought that would be a great way to go.

I used the funny pipe just a few inches under the mulch to prevent a lot of digging and I put in four sprinkler heads to cover her yard and a couple of misters.

It all worked quite well the day I was there and then a few weeks later after I was down the road in another town she said she was having problems. I really tried to figure it out over the phone and she tried to figure it out but with no luck.

I was about 2 hours away at Jordan Lake and she said well you're going to either have to come up here and help me out or I won't have to hire some plumber. I thought it really stinks to have to hire a guy, so I drove on up to Winston-Salem to give her a hand.

It was the strangest thing the sprinkler head at the bottom left of her driveway had lost its orifice control gadget and had been pouring out but only a foot forward. All I had to do is put the orifice back in and the head became functional again.

Everything seemed to work pretty good after that. Unfortunately was a zone that had a pipe fitting that was broken and I fixed that also.

I obviously jumped for a couple of weeks just to tell the sprinkler story but really Tanglewood was pretty uneventful except for working hard on the yard and visiting and just generally enjoying ourselves.

Now I have to say right now that I'm actually writing is three or four months after it happened but as of today, we have a cat collar tracking device so Bert is no longer capable of disappearing.

Back to the story. It's our day to leave and Bert decides to show his butt again..

To me I don't know what to make of it except that he likes to what we do but he doesn't like the bouncing down the highway part and this is his rebellion.

I'll say it again since this had been happening so much, we have a cat tracker now, but apparently I was a slow learner and we had to suffer much more before I got it.

It's our day to leave Tanglewood and this place is a lot stricter with a lot more interaction with a campground host and the checkout time is 11 a.m.

Knowing how Bert is we had him trick because so we closed up the RV after breakfast so he couldn't leave and run off as it was the day to leave.

We have something we call the dungeon inside the RV. It down inside where all the pipes and wires are and like to go hang out down there.

There is a furnace return frill that allows access from the inside of your RV into the storage compartment area.

He really enjoys going in there and we call it the dungeon because it’s kind of reminds me of where spot lives, Eddies pet dragon on The Munster’s.

On a pretty regular basis Bert leaves the living room and just kind of crawls into the furnace return grill area and be lost in the dungeon having a big time.

From the compartments to the outside world there is no access at least we would have sworn it so.

After breakfast we locked everything up and Bert went into the dungeon but we knew it didn't matter because we knew he couldn't get out. He would just be down there and be all angry that he couldn't get out.

We retracted the slide outs put everything away and coupled up to the truck and started to pull out. While we knew Bert was in the dungeon but we were surprised he hadn't come out yet. I told India I would do one lap around Tanglewood RV park just to see if it was stir him.

I suggested that she sit in the kitchen chair so as we got on to the highway bumping around, he would come out and say oh my God and jump on the bed where you lies when we're going down the highway.

Well as I started to get in the truck and pull out the hit on I-40 I looked over there by one of the cedar trees and there was Bert.

There must be some weird crevice or opening between the dungeon and the outside world that he found. We were not aware of this.

He was about 5 minutes away from being left there at Tanglewood while we headed down 40 toward Asheville.

I went over towards him and said Bert what in the world is your problem why don't you just get in the dang RV.

As I would walk towards him, he would walk further away and although he only has one word, he was saying, fork you Dad.

I followed him and begged him to come towards and then he slipped into the woods and there was no more Bert.

Now begins the gee I can't find my cat and then nice little family of four including a little five-year-old started helping me.

The Mom asked and I said yeah, he's playing hard to get and she said can we help and I said yeah so man they spend an hour trying but then they had to leave.

I was still looking for him and I saw the little girl crying her eyes out saying but what about Bert.

They couldn't see me but I came out of the woods and told them I'm so sorry that it's upsetting your little girl so much. Try to help her understand that I will find my cat and I'm not going to leave without him but she's very kind to care so deeply.

I told them that I felt like they were very good parents for having a child that cared so deeply about a perfect stranger with a silly cat and they should be proud of themselves.

They took the compliment and headed on out.

Well at this point I'm past the 11 check out time it's more like noon and I talked to the campground host in person.

I told them of my situation they say they understand they say there's no one coming to that site today so not to worry. They did say there is a limit and that I should talk to the front desk at about 4 p.m. I have either have found the cat or I need to pay for another day and that was kind of very cool of them.

I don't know if you can imagine how this story ends but at four I gave up on my idiotic cat and I went ahead and paid for another night. When I get back to the RV, Bert says hey how are you doing and jumps right in and eats a little cat food.

Again, he only has one word but he is saying, oh were y'all looking for me. I'm sorry I was just, you know didn't get that you were actually calling me for 4 hours but how can I help you?

I told Bert thanks you for your consideration but I've already paid the lady for another night so you might as well just enjoy your cat food but thank you for checking in like this.

I can say this was the last time that this happened. I wanted to make sure that I was completely insane by doing the same thing over and over again and getting the same result and believing it would be different next time.

I ordered the cat tracking collar and we now use it and it works great, but we are slow learners.

In my defense I really did go into this imagining that it would be easy to pack up on the day we needed to leave because I didn't know there was a hole in the dungeon that led to the outside world.

After this fiasco we now close up the dungeon grille on the day we leave and when we locked in. We have to do this on the day we leave around 6 or 7 a.m. or we will have problems.

At least now we can track him but we find it best to not let him explore at all on our leaving day.