Having two LR catalogues and using an external hard drive?

I use LR as my primary image storage/editing application and have gathered about 250 gb worth of photos on my macbook pro internal drive. I need to transfer everything to an extenral hard drive and just edit the images from there, but have a question about this workflow. (I have this external hd in mind: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/810936-REG/Western_Digital_WDBC3G0030HAL_NESN_My_Boo k_Studio_External.html)
Specifically, would it be possible to maintain two lightroom catalogues: one on the drive, and one on my laptop? All of the images would ultimately be on the external HD, but if I'm on location/etc where I don't have access to the drive, I'd like to option to always be able to upload the images to my laptop and then move them to my main catalogue on the external HD at a later time.
Also: would formatting said external HD as FAT32 be a good idea if I ever plan on viewing/editing them on a windows machine?
Any way, is this a reasonable workflow? Any suggestions regarding this or working from an external HD in general?
Thanks

Yes and/or no.
You can use two catalogs (1 on Laptop and 1 on External HD). Transferring files and data is not difficult once you know how. So it a question of comfort level.
If working on both platforms is something that you plan to do on a regular basis then you may simply want to put the catalog and its associated preview files in a Dropbox folder. Install Dropbox on both machines and the catalogs will be in sync on both machines. This eliminates the exporting and import from another catalog.
Terry White has a good write up here.
Personally I use it to store my presets so when I create a new preset on the road, its available on my home machines.

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