The mark of Camino was carved on my cheek. It was carved on my arms, my hands, my legs, and my feet. I felt as if kitty had followed the fictional Zorro’s modus vivendi and taunted me: As the storied highwayman would sneer: “We have had enough of playing,” Señorita. “It is time for the punishment!” Camino’s pouncing and slashing – his play – left me punctured and scratched and a little shaken from our clash. I escaped into the toilette to dab at my wounds, and when I returned to the room Camino purred in his joy at seeing me. “What do we have here, kittycat?” He danced at the sound of my high, singing kitty-voice. A mercurial savage that calls for a firm hand, or an innocent orphaned kitten acting out his need for love? Camino climbed my leg and back – more lance pricks – to snuggle under my chin, and that’s when I heard in his purr, Mami, I’m bored.

Bored with Biarritz?

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Lake Annecy, the Haute-Savoie stunner in southeastern France, where the medieval town of Annecy adds splendor to its shores with canals and bridges and cobbled-stone streets, seemed like a good idea.

“Ready to road-trip, my kitten?” Camino had mastered the litter box, so why not drive him across the entire width of France to see the “Venice of the Alps,” with its lake said to be the crystal-clearest in Europe, its ancient pastel houses, its medieval château once home to the Counts of Geneva? He seemed to assent when I started packing our travel affairs and he watched with some suspicion from within his travel house. “Eager to go already?” It wasn’t like we had anything better to do: Pilgrims like Carolyn were reporting from the Camino about adventures as blood-stirring as the alber-goo bedroom that “gave the illusion of warmth, but…it was so cold Ali’s fingers turned deathly white and the freezing showers left us dripping and chilled.” Certainly, Annecy wouldn’t be that. Sad as I was to say au revoir to Anne Marie’s happy hospitality, it would be good to test how mobile I could be without a mule. Could I road-trip while carrying Camino and the big-ass suitcase and the weighty carry-on and all of kitty’s this and that now parked inside a pack that felt like the woe of the world upon my back? For the cross-country drive I would be renting a dashing BMW wagon (a nice Alamo surprise), but what if I had to, like, eventually get out to move us into our next AirB&B? The studio would be found, I understood, in the pedestrian-only part of the town’s Vielle Ville; on the map this historic area looked like a crazy maze of streets, mostly unmarked.   

It turns out, I definitely should have worried.

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Midnight. After 12 hours of rolling rapturously along glass ribbons of road – Camino asleep or at ease in his house – we arrived in Annecy. The pelting rain pummeled us; the dark was so dense it felt like a smothering shroud. From café to café I wandered, asking drunken outdoor diners if they knew where to find the Passage Nemours, No. 6. Kitty and I were hopelessly lost and wretchedly soaked and no reveler especially cared. Not until sweet Marie-Laure with the dragon tattoos up her neck, flames on her face, took me by the hand and walked us (and the big-ass suitcase, et al.) to our door. But how these late-hour merrymakers went wow for Camino! Ohhh, minou, minou, mon beau! Boozy and besotted, they nuzzled him, cuddled him, and passed him from hug to hug around the bistro tables; my celebrity kitten was handsome, he was their dear, he was the pussycat above all who was their heart’s own. Later, after Mami his mule had managed to offload our tonnage of travel gear into our Annecy home, Camino received his well, well deserved reward. “What a good and brave traveler you are!” I gushed in praise. “All this way in the car, in your crate, and you’re fine!” He regarded me coolly, no doubt musing, ergo, Señorita, this calls for tuna, no? Because he did not yet eat solid food, I bustled forthwith to gift him a triple serving of chickenish kitten mush – so pleased and proud that my travel pal proved – so far – to enjoy the road. Hopefully, as he grew, he would manage it all with aplomb, whether train or bus or metro; in four months he’d sleep peacefully for 16 hours straight, cramped under an Air France Economy seat. In my dreams.

In a quiet moment before bed, I queried him: “Camino, why do you think people find you so irresistible? What is it about you do you feel explains your obvious popularity, not just with veterinarians, but also with the general public?” Burping up a bit of kitten mush, he and his plump, overfed tummy waddled closer – the better to crawl into my lap for some love, I supposed. Silly misguided Mami. Camino in truth was maneuvering into better striking distance. Ow! I cried in surprise, for with one pounce he was upon me, the merciless blade of his claws lashing my protesting hands: Stop! Stop! I am unarmed! I pleaded. Between bites he caught my eye, and I am absolutely sure I heard in his level, unwavering gaze the words of McCulley’s black-masked caballero who once entered a room, like we did Annecy, “on the gust of the storm.” “I am the friend of the oppressed,” Señorita, he said without actually saying, in answer to my question, “and I have come to punish you!”

My Zorro had struck again.