Michele happened to be at a pet shop before our Mono trip where she saw a cat. What she was doing at the pet shop, I don't know – she says she was there to buy fish food – but, while there, she saw a cat that was up for adoption. Not being in the market for a cat, she just talked to it for a few minutes and left.

When we got back from our trip, the cat was still there. Maybe Michele had gone back for more fish food. The next week, she was still there and Michele started to get concerned that she would not be adopted. It turns out that the cat is a is only nine months old and is a mother. When she had her kittens, her owners – who must have been new owners, after all – dropped her off at a Feral Cat Feeding Center.

I am not sure that I even know what a Feral Cat Feeding Center is and I certainly don't know where one is. But it doesn't sound good. The cat had a micro chip so it was easy to track down the soon- to-be-ex owners who confirmed that they had named her Athena and now didn't want her. So, when Michele ran into her – at nine months – she had been adopted once, had kittens, had been abandoned, and now – then, really – lived in a cage.

You know where this is going. 

We are now the proud owners of Athena. Proud may not be the right word, and owners definitely isn't. When Michele first started talking about Athena – back when she was still a cat, before she was even the cat – I kept saying, Yea, but a cat would be a real pain in the ass. Now she is living in our home and Athena is pretty painless. Mostly because she is very shy and almost out of sight.

She spends most of her time under our bed coming out to look at us from across the room. When we call her name and make eye contact, she will come running across the room only to stop when realizes there is no cage wall between us. Today, I did manage to get her on top of the bed so I could take her picture. But, she was hyper-vigilant.

It will be an interesting journey.

I have never been a Princess Diana fetishist so I find the whole thing a little strange, OK, a lot strange. But – if you are a fetishist – here is some underwear you might want. The caption – in Chinese – says  Feel The Romance Of British Royalty and nothing, of course, says romance like the cello.

When we first started out trip, it was all possibility. Everybody we talked to, who had been there had a suggestion on where to go, and they all sounded great. I talked to a guy at Vermilion Resort and he said Laural Canyon is great. A guy at the Rock Creek Pack Station said Hopkins was gorgeous. We can't miss Second Recess, almost nobody goes there because it is in the middle but it is supposed to be spectacular. In the end, we missed them all.

On Thursday morning, we calculated that we had somewhere between twelve and fourteen miles to get out and three days to do it. Over breakfast, we made a plan to hike about half way out on Thursday , explore on Friday, and hike out the remainder on Saturday. Our only fixed point was to catch a ferry across Lake Thomas A Edison at 4:45 on Saturday. It seemed pretty easy. Even when we put our packs on, for the first time in three days, it seemed easy.

 But we got a late start, the trial was rougher and more interesting than we had expected, and we found lots of reasons to stop and photograph. It was starting to get dark when we made camp.

That night, we revised our plans. Getting into the Second Recess or Laural Canyon seemed like more work than we wanted to do: Second Recess required crossing Mono Creek which had become quite large and Laural required a steep 500 plus foot climb before we would start hiking it. And it had become painfully obvious that we were not going to be making any early starts.

We revised our plan to making two very easy days with lots of stops and a late start rather than two ball-buster days with a chance of missing the ferry on Saturday. So, the next morning, we got got right to lazing around with lots of grooming time.

We got to the John Muir Trail, a virtual highway at rush hour, in time to watch the sunset of Mono Creek. We were only three and a half miles from the ferry. The next morning, we got up, wandered around taking pictures, and then eased our way into the traffic towards Lake Thomas A Edison. Even with a couple of long stops, it came up much quicker than we expected. We were back in civilization, or – at least – what passes for civilization at 8,000 feet.

We even found somebody to take our picture.

We were – mostly – happy campers.

The National Geographic has an article on dinosaurs from Transylvania in which they say Islands are wonderful natural laboratories for the study of
evolutionary change and for that reason have long attracted the
attention of biologists. Large animals often become smaller on islands and small ones become larger. This phenomenon is known as the "island rule."

Those sentences remind of sitting around a campfire in the Sierras with a friend – maybe 45 years ago. As I was staring at the fire, I noticed that the fire didn't actually touch the logs. It seemed to start just a little above the wood being consumed. I asked my friend, who was  somewhat of an amateur scientist, Why doesn't the fire touch the wood? 

My friend watched the fire for a few minutes as he thought over the question. Finally, he said, It's the fire principal. A relative of the Island Rule, I guess.