Taking a cat on a cross-country car ride

It started with the question - what do we do with the cat when we are gone for two weeks over Christmas? The idea of leaving him alone in the apartment just didn't seem right - he's too socialised to people. A couple friends offered to come by and visit him while we were gone, but I didn't think that I could do it. Ok, it isn't just that he's too socialised to us, I'm too attached to him. So could we take him on a 2-day, 1000-mile car ride? How would he handle the trip? How would we handle the trip? Fortunately, he's used to cars - he goes to school each day with my wife. So what else would we need? Food, water...and a litter box. The litter box was the biggest challenge - the thought of being stuck in a closed-up car wasn't an appealing idea. So we looked around the pet store and found several with lids. We got one with a lid, a door flap, and carbon filters to handle absorb odours. For water, we found a splash-proof water dish (it had a wide rim that did a pretty good job of preventing splashes. But we had to go across to the dog section to find it. Also in the dog section we found a clip that we could use to attach a harness (also for dogs) to the rear seatbelt. We added a long enough extender that gave him pretty much a run of the car, and we were off.

The first half hour of the trip went well, but at some point the cat realised that he had been in the car too long. He started crying, and wanted to go to my wife (who was driving). Fortunately, we have a pouch that he sits quite happily in - once he was in the pouch, he was happy (but until we found a place to pull over and safely put him in the pouch, no one was happy). After that, things settled down. Once he realised that he could get to her, he was much calmer. He spent most of the trip either sitting on the front passenger's lap, sitting on the back window looking out, of sitting on the roof of his new litter box. Getting him to take the trip was fairly painless. It was far more of a challenge for him to make friends with my father-in-law's cats.

Our experience in taking the cat cross-country can't easily be generalised. The most important thing was getting him accustomed to car rides. Giving him freedom to roam, and giving him the option to sit with people when he felt the need (such as when we were surrounded by big trucks) probably made the trip a lot easier. The covered litter box and the splash-proof water container made our trip a lot easier. All things considered, it was a good trip.