The Tale of a Tortoise

I'm ashamed to say it, but we are not the best tortoise owners out there.  Elina lost our original tortoise, Gumdrop.  We've had Bubbles for about a year now and we've definitely had our share of search parties this year.  What can we say?  We want to leave him outside when we're at home, so we built him a pen, but we are just so bad at making sure the pen is impenetrable.  Bubbles always manages to find SOME way out.  And once he gets out, he doesn't stop walking, so it's really easy to lose him.  Easier than you would think.

Since we were gone so much at the beginning of the summer, we asked our friends to watch Bubbles for us.  They've watched him before and they know what they're doing because they have a tortoise too.  They kept him for 3 weeks and when we got him back, he refused to eat.  He also stopped walking around in his tank.  He would walk around outside, but not in the tank.  We figured he was mad at us for leaving him for 3 weeks.  (Ha!)  But after 2 weeks of not eating, I started to get nervous.  Sooooooo, we took Bubbles to see a vet.  It is VERY difficult to find a vet who can treat a tortoise.  They are "exotic" and only a few vets can see exotic pets.

The vet said that Bubbles didn't look sick, so she recommended that we build a turtle table for him--a shallow table that has a water area on one side and bedding on the other side.  This would allow him to move around more in a safe environment.  So we repurposed our kids' water table and made it into a turtle table.  He did well in the water table and we watched him like a hawk for 2 weeks in it.  He couldn't get his claws to grip the sides of the water table so we knew he couldn't escape.

Well, while we were in Austin for our overnight trip, B put Bubbles into the water table after work.  We got home from Austin at 9pm and B realized that Bubbles had escaped from the water table!!  It was like he tricked us into thinking he couldn't escape....and then when it was just B at home, he made his move and broke free!  Argh!!  Who knew a tortoise could be such a pain????

So at 9:30pm all 6 of us were outside with our flashlights yelling, "Bubbles!" (as if he were going to respond to us!)  We couldn't find him, so we resumed the search in the morning...and found nothing.  This time we figured he was gone for good.

Two days pass by and on the third morning at 6:45am, I hear scratching outside of my bedroom window.  It sounded like someone was trying to drag away our drain pipes or gutters.  I looked out the windows and didn't see anything.  I even went to the backyard and found nothing.  Then B woke up and said he had heard it too, so he went out to look.  Within a few minutes, B ran back to the house, grabbed a screwdriver and said, "I think it's Bubbles!"

He unscrewed a drain pipe from the downspout and this is what he found--

Seriously?!? The scratching I heard was him trying to climb up into the downspout.  But his shell was stuck in the drain pipe!  It took B awhile to unwedge him.  It was pretty funny!

So, this guy had walked all the way down to our front driveway.  Then he saw the opening of the drain pipe and decided to climb into it.  Little did he realize that he was walking BACK to our house!  He walked quite a distance and then ended up stuck!  I'm sure when we opened up the drainpipe he was thinking, "These people AGAIN?!?!?!" 

Well, Bubbles, welcome back to your home sweet home!  Even when you try to escape, you end up right back in Elina's arms.  It was meant to be!