Cat NOT a Good Traveller
Everybody else seems to have animals that take well to travelling. Not so my wife's 11 year old cat.
We went on on trip early in the summer, but had to limit it to 11 days as that was as long as we could leave the cat at home by itself. She is antisocial and wouldn't tolerate being in a kennel.
When we made reservations for an 8 week trip to Oregon/Washington my wife sorrowfully started looking into a cat shelter to give her to. We finally decided to try her in the truck in a cage, but she meowed loudly the whole time. I read on one of these forums about animal tranquilzers for travel, so we went to the Vet, paid the bill, and got some of them (along with a special syringe to put them down her throat). We took a "test" drive in the truck and the cat meowed LOUDLY the forst 30 minutes. My wife was fed up by then and we decided to give her the tranquilizer. It was a good fight, my wife ended up with a good bite on her finger (that later got infected). By the time we made it to the coast the cat had gotten 3 doses of the tranquilizer which she resisted valliantly. You could see that she wan unsteady on her feet and nearly falling asleep, but she kept loudly meowing. Finally, we gave up and released her from her cage and let her roam the truck (except the driver's area). After a half hour or so out of her cage she shut up and went to sleep. We thought we had come up with the solution - She hates the cage!!!
So we start off on the first day's travel of our Oregon adventure, and she won't shut up, in or out of the cage. Finally, we pull over to side of the road, put her in the cage (wife was concerned about her bing crushed by a slide when we set up camp), and put the noisemaker in the trailer. Deb was also concerned about it being too hot for her, so we opened all of the windows we could. When we would stop for meal breaks we would hear the cat mewing away through the closed door.
The good news is when we finally got to our destination, she settled in to living in the Bighorn like she was born there.
When we moved on to Seattle and then back to Sacramento I rigged up a wireless indoor-outdoor thermometer I already had by attaching the outdoor sensor to her cage in the trailer, and taking the readout into the cab of the truck. Then we knew that the temperature in the trailer at her cage was OK.
So I guess now Lass still isn't a good traveller, but she is a good camper.