Monday

Orientation was Monday morning. They get you signed in and then you watch a short video about the sanctuary. There were several wet eyes in the room. Then a tour of the entire place. And yes, you take a van. The sheer size of the place is amazing. Something like 350-400 employees with about 1700 animals on site at any given moment. They told us they had 11,000 volunteers last year.

After the tour we met with a volunteer coordinator who got us signed up for where we were planning to work all week.

Lunch can be purchased at Angel Village every week day for $5. It is vegetarian - which I am not. However, everything was pretty good. OK - except the meatless meatloaf....that just didn't do it for me.

I will say this - drink plenty of water and bring snacks. I had a pack that I carried all week.

After lunch I headed up to cats. Signed it at HQ and then headed to Casa de Calmar which is where the FeLV cats live. I checked out several rooms and then sat down in the lobby. Each house has several cats living in the lobby. Some are just more social and some need more attention. In Calmar, Layla is one of the lobby cats. When she first came to the sanctuary, she ran up into the rafters and wouldn't come down. So they moved her to the lobby in an effort to help her discover that people are a good thing. I sat in a chair and she climbed up in my lap. We must have sat there for about 20 minutes. One of the caregivers walked by and then backed up to see who was sitting on my lap. Seems Layla doesn't necessarily like everyone. I said she climbed up herself and the caregiver just smiled.