purr michigan: a road trip story

It's hard to believe it's been three weeks since Gru and I embarked on a road trip to our new home. We weren't quite sure how he would do on the six-hour drive, given that he usually meows non-stop on even the shortest errand.

But we had a hunch that perhaps all the talking was him being stressed out in his cage...so we made plans for a trip that allowed him to be out of his cage.

The plan included setting up his bed and a blanket he liked in the passenger seat of Wildcat Guy's truck, with the thought that he might nap through a lot of the trip.

Well, he napped. Just not in his bed, and not for very long. Every time I thought he'd finally settled down to sleep, he'd hop back up onto the console to tell me just how little fun he was having.

Any time we stopped - as here, at a rest stop - I spent a few minutes loving on him to see if it would help him feel calmer.

He never did quite lose his anxiety, though - even resorting to hunkering down in his cage (which I left open in the backseat in case he became too difficult and I needed to contain him quickly).

It was amusing, actually, that he spent so much time sitting on the console, considering that he was a bit too big to lie down comfortably on it. Oh, he tried - but always, either his head or his bottom was falling off.

Eventually, he did give his bed a try...hanging out there for just long enough that I thought he might settle down at last. (Never mind that we were more than four hours into our six-hour drive!)

"Kitty, we made it to Michigan!"

As we came into the last hour or so of the drive, though, he decided he'd had enough of being near me and needed, instead, to sit on me. Safe? Well, no. But he laid there quietly, so I let him be.

Once we arrived and I got our lease paperwork taken care of, I did put him in his cage to carry him into our new apartment safely.

I ran a couple of errands, and then it was time for dinner. Because dinner makes anything better.

A corner to curl up in doesn't hurt, either. All in all, he traveled so well. Granted, he still talked through most of the trip, and the interior of Wildcat Guy's truck was a little bit furry by the time we arrived...yet it could have been so much harder.

It has reminded me to be thankful our kitty is so laidback, relatively speaking, and that he has settled into life in our new home so smoothly. As long as he has his people, apparently, life in his world is good.