Wednesday April 11, 2007 I was off work on vacation and looking for a reason to get out and do a short bike ride.  If you read the previous ride story you know our family cat Gizmo had escaped a little over a week ago.  I was beginning to think he wasn’t going to come home when surprisingly enough he did return home this morning. 

Diane had read on the internet that sometimes when a house cat gets outside it panics and goes into hiding.  Apparently the cat may become so scared that it only ventures out of hiding after dark.  This one website recommended putting out a live trap with the cat’s food and a couple of it’s toys in the trap.  We own a fairly large trap from when we had raccoons in our chimney a couple years ago, see this link for the story on the raccoons.  Diane got out the live trap and we set it up near the front porch of our house.  The trap had been out there for 5 or 6 days and we hadn’t caught anything, another reason I thought Gizmo was gone for good. 

Early this day Max came running into my bedroom yelling that Gizmo was caught in the trap.  I had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling off.  Diane couldn’t figure out how to open the trap.  I told Max I would be down in just a minute.  We opened the trap and sure enough it was Gizmo.  I think it was nine days since he left the house.  He was extremely skinny, like he hadn’t eaten anything the whole time he was gone.  He wasn’t very dirty, I was expecting him to be much dirtier.  It had snowed and rained a few of the days he was missing.  It was also a bit on the cold side, not a good time to pick for a cat walk about.  Gizmo did a lot of eating and sleeping over the next few days, but overall he seemed fine and has recovered to his normal size and disposition.  Needless to say the whole family, especially Diane, was very glad that Gizmo decided to return. 

After an hour of excitement of the adventure of getting Gizmo back everything was back to normal.  Diane headed out for one of her scheduled tennis matches.  Now that the cat was home we needed to take down all the lost cat signs Max and I had put up a week or so ago.  We put up ten signs and I decided I would ride my bike to take them down.  I had to ride around about a 2.5 square mile area to cover all the spots where we hung signs.  I ended up finding nine of the ten.  For some reason I just couldn’t find that last sign.  Maybe it fell down and blew away or maybe somebody took it down.  Or, maybe I just forgot where we put one of the signs.  I figured over the next couple weeks I might run across it either walking, riding or driving. 

Turns out I never did find that last sign.  Oh well, at least I did the responsible thing and took down all the signs I could find.  I ended up riding 7.3 miles total, max speed 20.5, average speed 9.8 mph and 44 minutes and 30 seconds of time on bike.   
David Lindquist