Mila: RV Traveling With A Cat
From Draft of 9/9/2022
Traveling with Mila, who had only ever been in a car three or four times in her life, and always lived in a house, has been a learning curve for both of us. Her house has never moved the way it does now. It’s an earthquake on wheels!
I had an idea to make her a passageway through the storage area to the back storage door where her litter box would be, to save space in the main living area. In exploring the idea I left a panel loose but in place. Frightened during our early travels, she found the loose board and crawled into the space between the bathroom and the storage/bed platform. I had to take the bed apart to get her out. At the next stay, she practiced going in and backing out as it wasn’t wide enough to turn around. Yes she is a very smart cat. I had secured that panel but not well enough I guess. So now I left the board off and let her have her safe space. It’s so much better than her other idea…
Seemingly at the worst time – not that there’s a good time for this – she found a new hiding place that was near Daddy (yeah, that’s what she calls me). Right under the brake pedal. I did have to step hard on the brake (the seemingly worst time I mentioned) and was so afraid I’d killed or injured her. There was road construction and no rest areas or even safe place to pull over for miles and miles. There is, thankfully, a lot of space there so I could brake sort-of normally but I could tell it was pressing against her whenever I did.
She did this two or three times. The last time, while stopped at a gas station, after the doors opening and closing, outside noises, time, coaxing, splashing with water all failed to get her out from behind the brake pedal, I grabbed her back legs and pulled her out, which went easier than I thought. She stood up ran to the back, presumably to what I now called her cave. She was fine, and happily, she didn’t do that again for the rest of the trip and soon I arrived safely at my friend’s house in Illinois.
While visiting my friend, I cut an opening connecting Mila’s cave to the storage area and placed the litter box there. I bought a dog cage with a side door and an end door. The end door lines up with the opening in the wall and the side door lines up with the back storage door, where I can open it to clean the litter box that is in the cage. I didn’t set up the dog cage part until later. Turned out I should have bought a bigger one so she could have her igloo in there too. Once I work that out, I’ll get her a new igloo, since it got litter tracked on, and probably absorbed the smell from it as well, so I put it outside where it got torrentially rained on so I think it’s history. I replaced it with one of those mats that supposedly catch the litter from her feet before she tracks it all over. I placed a board in the cage, now tunnel, for her to walk on instead of the pipes and wires.
3-1/2 years later (Sunday, March 22, 2026): planning to finish this post and publish it…
While at my friend’s house in Illinois, she had a child gate for the door to Mila’s and my room so that Mila had to hesitate before running out of the room when the door was opened. It worked well and when I left, she said to take the gate. I used it to block the way from Mila accessing the brake pedal area. I think it worked, or maybe she just no longer wanted to do that. For awhile, she still slept on the front seat when we were parked, but she doesn’t even do that anymore. For rides, and she now knows the word “ride”, she goes into her “house”, which is the base part of her cat tree. She really is so smart. That is now her go-to safety zone for rides and it will protect her from any falling/ flying items. She has adapted to rides and doesn’t mind them as much, although I think she still doesn’t like them.