Margarataville

  
This week found me vacationing on the lovely shores of paradise, Panama City Beach, Florida. I spent a lot of time in the pool (being made of rubber, it’s helpful that I’m a great floater), and that was a squeaktacious way to escape from the stifling heat and humidity currently gripping the southeastern United States. I had plans to work on my tan, but thought that with my dark black rat fur I’d end up extra-crispy, which is a bad idea, particularly around some of the Asian take-out restaurants. I also got to spend some time in the ocean, and though I had some trouble getting out to the surf due to sinking into the soft sands and having many a battle with the indigenous sand fleas (itchy little buggers), nothing could deter me from spending some blissful days in the crystal-clear waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
 
While out there I also hooked up with some of the locals to scope out PC Beach’s night life. It’s a little-known fact amongst you humans that beneath your city streets lay sewers just teeming with excitement for us members of the order Rodentia. My favorite place to sniff around is a little hole-in-the-wall called Margarataville. Aside from a wide variety of drinks including Rum and Sewage, the Long Island Iced Flea, and Shrewdriver, they also serve an assortment of cheeses, such as provolone, Monterey jack, mozzarella, cheddar, and – my favorite – Muenster. My comrats also did some flirting with the lovely ladies of the mouse variety, but not me: I’m married. (I’ll tell you more about my family life in a later blog.) My ’hood rats were trying to impress the sweeties with their rat-tastic dance moves, and a few of the more handsome ones (those with great-looking rat noses, like me) did succeed in whiskering up a second date.
 
Toward the end of my last night under the town, though, we scuttled into a bit of a problem. While we were on the dance floor shaking our tails to the beat with the girls, it seems that someone made off with our cheese. We returned to our nestlet only to find those heavenly slices missing, though our drinks were left behind. Some of my pals think the male mice, jealous of us flirting with their dames, were behind the thievery. (Hey, once you go rat, you know that’s where it’s at!) But I suspect it was really those dastardly sand fleas. Every rat knows they’re bad news – always jumping around the beach like pests (not that I, as a rat, would know anything about being a pest) – and like I squeaked before, I’d already had problems with them. It also makes sense that they’d take the cheese but leave the drinks behind: they’ve got plenty of water from the sea. So as I was drowning my sorrows in a glass of havartirita I decided to wax lyrical, and here’s what I came up with:
 
Wastin’ away again in Margarataville.
Searchin’ for my lost slices of cheese …
Some ’hood rats claim that there’s a mouse to blame,
But I know it was really those fleas.
 
(Four paws up to Mr. Jimmy Buffett for my scratching of this parody on his hit song “Margaritaville.”)
 
If you too have vacationed in your own little slice of paradise this year, I hope your trip was rat-tastic. And if you’ve yet to leave but have plans to go to the beach, I’d advise you to keep on the squeak-out for those cheese-stealing, bandit sand fleas.
 
Keepin’ it squeak,
Bob