Day 5 - Pets & Pipers

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Feeling refreshed after a good night’s sleep we pay our five bucks and enter the Murray Canal, making for Picton. There we hope to find cheap fuel and a stopover on our way to Waupoos Island.

Unfortunately, Mister Huxley still seems to be in some discomfort so we phone ahead and book an appointment for her at the Picton Animal Hospital. After several hours of traveling up Long Reach, we get to Picton and tie up at the marina wall where we will spend the night. We take a taxi with Mister Huxley and arrive at the vet that has two doors; one for pets and one for farm animals. Briefly, I wonder which door we would use if Huxley was our pet cow. No time for that! (On the inside we find that the two doors enter into the same room but just on opposite sides of a large desk.) I am struck by a mental image of an old farmer with a pig filling in forms as I do for my cat.

Huxley is examined and it is decided after poking and prodding and an expensive blood test that she has a sprained leg. She is prescribed a sort of liquid, feline ibuprofen that we will administer orally. When we get her back to the boat she is given a double dose and she seems to react well.

It is damned hot but we decide to bicycle into town for supplies. Mister Cookie’s folding clown bike is doing well by her and we get many stares as we make our way down the steamy main street.

Brooke & her fabulous folding bicycle

Upon returning to the boat we are greeted by the sight of a large cruiser that has somehow managed to dock in the small space behind us. We find the owners (with their two dogs) are fellow Loopers and are planning to finish a circuit in a couple of years. The dogs ignore Mister Huxley as she stares down on them with disdain.

Mister Huxley turns her back on the frolicking hounds

A meal of beef tenders and wine at the picnic table is taken and then a couple of hours later the Loopers return from a foray into town. With them they have members of the local bag-pipe squadron in tow and we sit for a while outside chatting about bag-piping and local gossip. I find it ironic that one of the major shared beefs of the bag-pipe squadron is the proliferation of wind turbines. It would seem to me anything to do with wind would delight a bag-piper, but I stand corrected. 

Enraged bag-piper about to lose it at the sight of a wind-turbine

We are driven inside by mosquitoes and the creeping suspicion that we may have said the wrong things re: the wind.