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Stowaway cat hid in a camper to go on family vacation and captured hearts along her journey

Delilah the cat was a hit at the biggest air show in the country.

oshkosh air show, delilah the cat, andrea scholten
via Mike Fonseca/Flickr

The EAA AirVenture air show.

According to a series of Facebook posts, the Scholten family embarked on a 1200-mile journey from St. Albans, Maine, to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on July 22 to see the legendary EAA AirVenture air show. Known as the “World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration,” the weeklong event attracts over 500,000 people to see more than 10,000 aircraft.

News Center Maine reports that 15 hours and 900 miles down the road, in Toledo, Ohio, the family stopped for a routine pit stop and got an incredible shock. Their cat Delilah had secretly hitched along for the ride in the family camper.

"I open the door, and there's Delilah," Andrea Scholten told News Center Maine. "I just screamed 'Delilah!' and my husband and the kids were like 'Delilah!'”

“She must have snuck in when Jay loaded the pillows this morning,” Andrea wrote on Facebook.

So what was the family to do with their cat? Take it to the air show or board it somewhere in Ohio? They were two-thirds of their way to the event so they decided to take the cat along with them and hope for the best. “We went to Target, we bought her food, litter, a collar that we could write her name on because we were completely unprepared for this,” Andrea added.

“The plan so far is to see how she does as a camper cat. If she doesn’t do well, we’ll have to find a kennel,” Andrea wrote in a Facebook post.

The Scholtens shared the story on Facebook with the hashtag "stowawayoshkoshcat" and posted updates to the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2022 page. The posts quickly went viral and Delilah became the most famous pet at the air show.

People asked for more photos of Delilah on Facebook so the Scholtens kept them coming.

“We thought it was funny,” she told Central Maine. “I started posting to my Facebook friends and my husband started posting to the AirVenture and people wanted more. That’s when we started the hashtag.”

The cat was a hit at the air show. People came up to their camper with gifts for the sneaky feline and a skywriter drew a picture of the cat in the sky above the air show.

After the air show, the family made it home safely. Delilah was so much fun to have at the event, they’ve decided to bring her back next year.

“This threw us for a loop for sure, but she seemed to have fun. We plan to do it again next year,” Andrea told Central Maine.

To commemorate her first trip to the EAA AirVenture air show, the Scholtens are going to buy Delilah a brick under the famed Brown Arch at the airfield. The arch is surrounded by 3,000 inscribable bricks where people can leave their mark and become a permanent part of the air show’s history. The Brown Arch was the original flight line at the EAA Fly-In at Oshkosh and is the most identifiable landmark on the massive property.

Who knows, Delilah may make history as the first cat to be inscribed on the landmark.

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