Moving Cross-Country With 6 Pets: Lessons From 2,200 Miles

Amy Castro: Coming up on The Pet Parent Hotline. What I learned traveling 2,200 miles with one other adult and six pets.

We’re talking long-distance moves, multiple animals, car chaos, cleaning supplies, backup plans, and why you need to plan your travel based on the pets you actually have, not the pets you wish you had.

Welcome to The Pet Parent Hotline

Amy Castro: You’ve reached The Pet Parent Hotline, your lifeline to practical solutions for your toughest pet parenting challenges. I’m your host, Amy Castro, and I’m here to help you cut through the noise and turn expert advice into step-by-step strategies so you can stop chasing your tail and start enjoying life with pets again.

Why This Is Not Generic Pet Travel Advice

Amy Castro: You’ve reached The Pet Parent Hotline. I’m your host, Amy Castro, and today I’m sharing six lessons I learned from a 2,200-mile cross-country move with six pets.

And first off, I want to let you know, I haven’t really actually moved yet. I’ve just landed in my friend Bev’s driveway, still living in the RV. Well, not really living in the RV, but the pets are pretty much staying in the RV. And so there will be more to come as to how this story evolves.

But I want to be clear right now from the start. This episode is not just a generic “how to take your dog for a car ride” kind of episode. This is about long-distance travel with multiple pets, multiple days on the road, and hopefully to give you some ideas of some lessons that I learned along the way and little things that can go wrong when your pets are out of their normal routine and you’re just wanting to get from point A to point B safely.

I’m also not going to give you the whole play-by-play today because some of the stories from the road really need their own conversation. There are definitely a few moments from this trip that deserve more room than I have to be able to give them here, and probably a little more emotional distance before I can talk about them without reliving the experience and the smell.

But while it’s still fresh in my mind, I wanted to share some practical lessons: what worked, what I would do differently, and what I think pet parents should think through before a major move or an evacuation or some type of long road trip with pets.

A Quick Note About Travel Medication

And a quick note before we get into it. If your pet needs medication for travel, or if you even think they might need medication for travel, talk to your vet ahead of time, follow their instructions, and don’t wait until you’re on the road, or it’s your first day of travel, to try something new.

For our pets who needed it, timing really mattered. Dosages really mattered, and there were some trials and tests that we needed to go through to figure that out. And unfortunately, everybody got to experience that on the road instead of experiencing that in advance.

Being on the road, being stressed out, still having 200 miles ahead of you, and realizing that your cat’s medication dose is nowhere near what they need is not something that you want to figure out on the road. That is something you want to plan ahead, test ahead, and talk to your vet about.

So that’s my little sidebar note on the whole meds issue.

With that said, here are six of the lessons I learned from traveling with my pets 2,200 miles in eight days.

Lesson 1: Decide Your Stopping Strategy Before Your Trip Starts

The first lesson is to decide your stopping strategy before your trip starts.

This may sound like a small thing, but it’s not. A lot of people assume that if you’re traveling with pets, you should stop constantly, like every hour, every two hours, let everybody out, walk dogs, offer water, offer litter box, stretch, reset, and then get back on the road.

And for some pets and some people and some trips, you know what? That might be the right answer. If you’re only traveling with dogs or you’re traveling with cats that are used to travel, that might work for you.

For us, that was not the case. And I don’t think many stops, many outings, many disruptions would have been better. Every stop creates more movement, more open doors, more leash handling, strange smells, other dogs, traffic noise, et cetera, all of which created a situation for our pets where they were uncomfortable, they didn’t potty like they were supposed to, and I think it’s more opportunities for things to go wrong.

So we sort of decided early on in our trip that we were not going to stop every couple of hours just because that sounded like what you should do. Our plan was to plow straight through each travel day, but we kept the driving time reasonable.

So for us, that meant about four and a half to five and a half hours max, not twelve, not “let’s just push through a couple more hours because the map says that next stopping point is better,” but more of a contained kind of realistic driving day.

And I think that really reduced the stress for our pets, the stress for ourselves, the number of transitions, and we still got here. Granted, it might have taken us eight days and you might have gotten here in seven, but for us that extra day was well worth it.

My point here in sharing this is not to say that there’s a magic formula for how many hours or how many days. The point is that not everybody should do it exactly the same way. You need to make that decision, and hopefully either early on in your trip or before you get started, but definitely before you’re already tired or annoyed or hungry and sitting in a parking lot, kind of trying to decide whether you want to offload everybody and whether it’s worth the risk and the stress.

I think you also really need to know when your pets have had enough. That doesn’t always mean stopping right that second, because sometimes stopping creates a whole new set of problems. But it does mean you need to plan the day around what your pets can realistically handle.

A 10-hour day, a 10-hour drive, might look efficient on paper, but with your animals, it may not be realistic. For us, we decided that the window of opportunity was about the tolerance level of our oldest pet, which is Pickles.

Despite medication, she pretty much cried most of the trip. And of course, as soon as we stopped every night and let her out of her crate, she was fine. So we figured that having her travel, let’s say, an average of five hours, where she maybe cried three of it, was about all that anybody could really handle.

So again, lesson one is this: decide your stopping strategy ahead of time. Don’t default to what sounds good in theory or what your cousin was able to accomplish. Think about your actual animals, your actual setup, your route, and what will keep everybody safe and as calm as possible.

Lesson 2: Be Prepared to Be Annoyed and Be Ready to Pivot

The second lesson is a personal note from me to you: be prepared to be annoyed and be ready to pivot.

I have a very low tolerance for being annoyed, and I think I get annoyed very easily. And I know that doesn’t sound warm and fuzzy, but I think it needs to be said, because I think a lot of people don’t like to admit that their pets can annoy the heck out of them, especially when they’re trapped in a car with a crying cat for three and a half hours.

So you can love your pets deeply and still be annoyed when you are listening to them whining, panting, barking, pacing, crying, smelling them, shifting their body weight, or whatever special talent they have that they bring to the annoyance factor of your travel experience.

Being annoyed doesn’t make you a bad pet parent. It makes you human doing a stressful thing with live animals who don’t understand your itinerary. And the problem is not the annoyance. The problem is when the annoyance turns into a meltdown.

Because when you’re traveling with pets, things are going to happen. Bedding may need to go to a laundromat. That’s a story for later. Something may need to be cleaned that you didn’t want to clean. A pet may need to be moved from where they’re originally seated. Plans need to change.

And in those moments, having a fit, I will tell you from experience, does not help. I’m not saying you won’t feel like having one, but I’m saying it’s not going to solve anything.

So it’s really, to me, more of a mindset shift. And having a conversation, like as I listened to Pickles cry for most of the trip, that she was uncomfortable, that me talking to her, trying to console her, every time I said her name, it made the situation worse and made her cry more.

So by staying silent and just having a conversation in my own head that she’s just crying, she is comfortable, she is not hurt, there is nothing that I can do about it, and I’m just going to focus on my driving, focus on listening to the music, and try not to hone in on listening to that or even letting my brain spin out of control with thoughts of, “Why is she doing this? Why does she have to be so annoying? Why can’t she be quiet like everybody else?”

Those things are what spin you into being annoyed and angry. And so if bedding has to go to a laundromat, you take it to a laundromat. If something gets dirty, you stop and you clean it. If your setup’s not working, you make the change. If the cat is crying, you try to put it to the background of your mind.

And you can be irritated and you can still handle it. You can mutter under your breath and still make good decisions. And I know that’s not really inspirational, but I think it is very realistic.

So lesson number two again is to expect frustration because it is going to show up, but then build enough flexibility into your mindset that you can pivot without making the situation worse. And if you need to have a meltdown, you can do that when you arrive at your destination.

Lesson 3: Keep Cleaning Supplies Where You Can Actually Reach Them

The third lesson is to keep cleaning supplies where you can actually reach them.

And that was something that really helped us. Not packed neatly in a bin underneath ten other things, not somewhere in the RV, not in the car when the mess is in the other vehicle. I mean literally reachable.

And that meant that I had an inordinate amount of rolls of paper towels and cleaning supplies that I was told by another human being who was on the trip with me was too much. But I am glad that we had them because it turned out we needed them on a couple of occasions.

So when you’re traveling with pets, especially for multiple days, you need to assume that somebody is going to pee, poop, puke, drool, spill water, step in something, knock something over, whatever the case may be. And it will not happen at a convenient time. It will not happen when you are rested and parked and ready.

It will happen after you thought you were going to get off to a good start for the day, and 30 minutes into your trip, your dog decides to poop all over the backseat of the car.

So have paper towels, wipes, trash bags, so important, gloves, extra towels, extra bedding if they’re on beds, pee pads, enzyme cleaner, and whatever else makes sense for your particular pets, and have them where you can grab them quickly and easily.

Also, think about what is underneath and around your pet. Our seat cover on the backseat of our car was a saving grace. However, the fact that it had a hole where the seatbelt goes apparently turned out to be a target for my dog.

Again, story coming later, but think about how well that seat is covered. Think about cracks. Think about floors. Do you have mats on your floors that can easily be cleaned? Think about what’s in the bottom of your crate. And also think about things you might be willing to throw away.

One of the things that we found was that there were a couple of things that got messy, that there was no way we wanted to drive another thousand miles and carry, and it wasn’t something we could take to a laundromat. So we put it in a garbage bag and we threw it away. But that means having backups.

The other thing I would say if your pets are traveling in crates is think about covers too, not just for mess, but for stimulation. One of the things that I found with Pickles, who was our one that cried most of the trip, is that if I put a towel over the door of her crate, she still had plenty of ventilation and she had access to air conditioning. But not being able to see out of the crate was helpful for her.

The other two cats didn’t care. Didn’t hear a peep from them for 2,200 miles when they were on the road. But Pickles, that seemed to significantly help, along with me not talking to her.

So limiting what your pets can see and hear can sometimes help them settle in instead of reacting to every car, everything that passes the window, what the other dog is doing, sounds, or movements around them. Not every pet wants to stare out at the world for five hours. Some pets do a lot better when their world is made a lot smaller.

So again, lesson number three is not just bring cleaning supplies. It’s keeping them within reach, protecting your vehicle and crates before there’s a problem, and assume that accidents are not a possibility, but they are going to happen, and make them part of the plan.

Lesson 4: Make Sure Every Pet Has a Secure Space of Their Own

The fourth lesson is to make sure that every pet has a secure space of their own.

And we went round and round on whether we should try to put pets together in crates or in the back of the car with just a gate. And I think it really matters all of the time, but I think it matters even more when pets are stressed, tired, overstimulated, or easily get sick of each other.

Traveling is not the time to assume everybody’s going to be fine together because they might be fine at home. Home is familiar. Travel may not be.

So every pet, I think, needs a place where they can be safely contained and as much as possible left alone. That could be a crate, a carrier, a gated area, a separate room once you arrive if you’re staying in a hotel or someplace like that, or a specific space in an RV or vehicle. But it needs to be secure. Not just, “This is where I hope they will lay down and stay,” but actually secure.

And I think that’s especially important with cats because a stressed cat in a new place is not the same as a relaxed cat in your living room. They really need the containment and a safe space to hide. They need litter box access that makes sense. And they need you to not create a situation where an open door suddenly becomes an escape hatch for a terrified cat when you’re in a campground or a hotel parking lot or something like that.

What we found with our pets is that we crated the cats, each in their own crate. There was no need to have a crate that was big enough for litter boxes because what I have learned from other episodes of traveling with cats, and it’s true for my cats, is they’re not going to use the litter box anyway.

So taking them out halfway through the trip, giving them access to a litter box was not going to have them use that litter box. Giving them access to food and water, they were not interested. So keeping those days short and then allowing them to have access to all of those things worked much better for them.

And so again, we had all of our cats in separate crates, each securely strapped down in the RV.

And I think dogs need secure spaces too, even if they’re normally easy and get along just fine. Not only for your own safety for driving, but a dog who’s tired or stressed out, or even the medication can cause them to make choices that they wouldn’t necessarily make at home. And you don’t want to trigger any conflict or any situations with a dog getting loose and getting out of your car at a rest stop.

And don’t assume that one setup is going to work for every pet. We found this very early on in our travel process. Some of our animals did better when they could see the driver. Some were better off not seeing anything. Some needed a little bit more space. So a certified safety harness on a certified safety leash was better than being in a crate to give them a little bit more legroom.

So you really need to know your pets. This is probably something to test in advance as well, or at least have backup plans. We didn’t necessarily test our setup in advance, but we definitely had alternatives should something not work out. And we had to take advantage of some of those along the way.

So again, lesson number four is that every pet needs a secure space of their own. The setup has to fit your animal, not the fantasy version of the animal who calmly cooperates because you’re already stressed, because they don’t care about that. And they’re not going to cooperate when you want them to.

Lesson 5: Have an Arrival Setup Order and Don’t Rush It

The fifth lesson is to have an arrival setup order and don’t rush it.

This was super important to us because we were not only offloading pets from a car, but setting up an RV, which you don’t want to rush because you can make mistakes that can cause damage to your RV. But also, it’s a matter of safety for the pets.

So when we arrive somewhere, we couldn’t just jump out, let the dogs out of the car, open everything up, and release the cats. I think that would have been a really terrible plan.

We chose to get the RV set up, which meant parking it, leveling it, hooking it up, cooling it down, and making it secure before the animals started moving around.

So that meant also setting up spaces for the pets inside, deciding who was going to go where, which we had already decided in advance, and having an order of offloading. So I think this setup really helped us, knowing how we were going to do things: set up the RV first, dogs out to potty, out of the car, dogs in the RV, everyone closed in, then let the cats out. That was the order that we basically did things.

And I think it really mattered because arrival is one of the easiest times to make a mistake. You’re tired. You’ve been on the road all day. We want to be done as humans. Your pets want out. And it’s easy to try to rush that, but that’s exactly when things go wrong.

So before you travel, think through your arrival sequence. And of course it’s going to depend on your mode of travel, but when you get to the campground or the hotel or the rental place or a friend’s house, what happens first? Who gets moved out first? Are the rooms ready? Is the temperature okay? Are the leashes all on the dogs before the doors get open? Are the litter boxes set up before the cats get loose? Does everybody have water ready?

It may sound a little bit like overthinking, but it’s really not. It’s going to be much easier to think that order through and at least test it than to try to figure it out when you’re exhausted and six animals are all wound up waiting to be released.

So again, lesson five: have an arrival setup order and respect it. Don’t let the desire to be done make you careless in the exact moment when you need to be paying attention.

Lesson 6: Test Your Equipment Before the Trip and Still Bring Backups

The sixth lesson is to test your equipment before the trip and still bring backups.

This is one I wish I had done better. It is very easy to look at your setup and think, “That should work.” The harness is there, the seatbelt strap is there, the crate is there, the bedding is there, the seat cover’s there, everything looks like it makes sense.

But there is a big difference between equipment sitting there and looking useful and equipment that is actually being used by an actual live animal who is stressed out, shifting around, stepping on things, leaning on straps, strangling themselves, not really, but getting twisted up, knocking bedding out of place, or doing whatever that particular animal decides to do in the moment.

And so a restraint system may look secure until your dog finds a way to release it. For example, Gunny was in a car safety harness with a car safety leash which was buckled into the car seat. And not two minutes down the road, she had stepped on that button and released herself. So that obviously was not going to work for her.

I mentioned the seat cover. It may look like it protects the seat until a mess finds that one area that’s not covered. Bedding may seem fine until somebody has an accident and now you need a backup and you need to figure out what to do with that giant bed that you decided you needed to bring along. Are you going to carry it dirty for the rest of your trip? Are you going to throw it away? Are you going to bag it and hope that it survives the rest of your trip? Are you going to go to a laundromat?

Having plans for those things, and that’s one of the things I think we did well, is we brought bedding that we knew if it got bad, we could throw away, and we had a backup plan.

And again, the crate setup may seem great until you realize your pet’s reacting to everything they can see and hear. So test your equipment and your supplies before the real trip. Not just, “Does this clip attach?” but, “Can my pet accidentally get loose? Are they going to twist themselves into a weird position? Is the crate actually secure? Is the bedding washable? Can I get it out and replace it quickly?”

That’s a big one.

And again, bring extras. Extra leashes, we definitely needed those. Extra harness strap, definitely needed those. Extra bedding, extra towels, extra cleaning supplies, trash bags.

The bigger point is that a long-distance move is not the time to discover your setup only works in theory.

So again, lesson number six is to test everything before your trip and bring backups anyway.

The Bigger Lesson: Plan for the Pets You Actually Have

So those are six lessons I learned from traveling 2,200 miles with one other human and six pets.

The biggest thing I took away from this trip is that traveling with pets is not about having a perfect plan. It’s about having a realistic one and having a plan A, B, and C.

You have to also look at the pets you actually have, the way they handle stress, the kind of messes they might make, and how much patience you’re going to have left after a long day on the road.

Need Help Planning a Long-Distance Move With Pets?

And if you’re facing a move, a long road trip, or a major life change with pets and you want help thinking it through, just get in touch. I can help you plan the route, the setup, the supplies, your stopping strategy, and give you some backup plans before you’re already in the middle of it. Get in touch: petparenthotline.com/consult

Because once you’re on the road, the goal is simple: get everyone there safely with as little chaos as possible.

Thanks for Listening

Thanks for listening to The Pet Parent Hotline. If you enjoyed the show, don’t keep it to yourself. Text a friend right now with a link and tell them, “I’ve got a show that you need to hear.” And ask them to let you know what they think.

And remember, your pet’s best life starts with you living yours. So be sure to take good care of yourself this week and your pets.