Cross Country…with cats

We left Santa Cruz to start our year away from home (Jessica’s sabbatical, my year-long leave) in late June. The first leg of our journey involved a cross-country drive from Santa Cruz, CA (home) to St. Louis, MO (my parents) to Asheville, NC (Jessica’s parents) with the eventual goal of leaving our cats with Mark and Sue in North Carolina. Anticipating this, we worked on some song lyrics before starting our trip:

Kitty cats in the car, we’re gonna drive real far.
Tephra’s gonna meow, it’s gonna be real loud.
Quicksand’s gonna hide, all throughout the ride.
This song makes Jess laugh, I hope she doesn’t crash.
It’s a real good song, you’re gonna sing along. 
We’re gonna see the Cohns, it won’t be on phones.
We’re gonna ride in rafts, when we see the Tafts.
Drivin’ cross the states, we’ll check COVID rates.

As you can see from the photo above, the cats were quite a bit freaked out about the journey. We brought them to the car in two separate cat carriers, but they spent nearly all of their time huddled together in one or the other of the assigned spaces. They were both on special kitty leashes we bought, so they could wander about in the back of the car, but not get underfoot in the front. On day one, they spent nearly 3 hours yowling, moaning, and generally freaking out. They explored the car, and tried everything they could think of to find a way to stop the misery. It didn’t stop. Lucky for Jess and I, they ran out of steam and eventually turned to lethargy as a survival strategy.

We took four days to get to St. Louis. Usually we do the drive in three days, but we decided that we wanted to integrate a few fun activities along the way (carefully planned to function with minimal impact on our cats). Each night we stayed in a “pet-friendly” hotel and we called ahead to make sure they would let us leave the cats at the hotel while we went out in the morning or evening.

The cats, needless to say, were a bit shocked by their daily new surroundings. Our first night was the worst, with both cats constantly on the prowl, yowling, and demanding our attention. There was a brief interlude from about 1am to 3am where I was able to sleep, but the rest of the night was fitful at best. This video gives you a good sense of how agitated Quicksand was…

They were also pretty good at finding unique hiding places. All the hotels, thoughtfully, had bed frames that extended all the way to the floor. But, unfortunately, the first one we stayed in had a tiny gap between that frame and the wall, which Tephra immediately discovered. When we managed to get her out of there and block the entrance up with towels, she later disappeared when we were briefly out of the room to unload the rest of the car. It took us about 15 minutes to find her, which is a surprising amount of time for a small hotel room without a lot of furniture. She managed to find a gap under the sink, but above the shelves underneath, so she was fully out of view unless we basically lay down on the bathroom floor. Thankfully, the next day, after we’d loaded everything into the car, it was pretty easy to locate the cats when they both decided that was the best (i.e. only) place to hide.

Anyhow, in the middle of the night, I awoke thinking, “why does it sound like there’s cardboard packaging scraping against the floor?” Well, cuz there was. He dragged it all over the hotel room and then finally brought it to me in bed (as he does with all of his treasures). I grabbed it and hid it under my pillow, and the next day we packed it more firmly away as we intended to give this to him when he gets to North Carolina, hopefully to help him settle in.

Fortunately, over the course of the trip, the cats got more and more used to being abused on a daily basis. They complained less each day as we leashed them, caged them, transferred them to the car, and drove on. And they kept us up less at night and snuggled with us more. By the time we got to St. Louis, they spent only a day or so completely hiding, and now they feel at home enough to explore my parents’ house several times a day. Quicksand has brought us gifts such as fuzzy slippers and he’s taken to playing the piano at least once each night after everyone’s gone to sleep. (Sadly, he’s not practiced, so his renditions are…low quality.)

Saturday, we’ll pack them up in the car one last time to drive from St. Louis to North Carolina, where they’ll be introduced to their sabbatical home. We had to make one last upgrade to our kitten transit coordination while we were in St. Louis. On both our 3rd and 4th day of travel, Tephra discovered she could slip out of her leash by pulling it to it’s full extension and then just walking out the front of it. She had been using the large harness we previously had for Earthquake (R.I.P.), while Quicksand was in the medium one that fits normal-sized cats. So, twice, while driving the passenger (once me, once Jessica) had to make a quick capture and lock Tephra up after she had escaped and tried to hide in various parts of the car.

It’ll be sad not to have these two cuties with us for the next year, but I’m very much looking forward to the adventure (and thanks to Mark and Sue, I’m sure they’ll be well cared for)…