Moving Cross-Country With a Cat: A Cautionary Tale

(Alternate title, credited to my girlfriend: "A Tale of Two Kitties: pre- and post-traumatic stress disorder")

This is Catniss. Let's find out what happens when we try to move Catniss from New Orleans to Colorado.

Here she is, pretending to be pizza. Slightly disdainful pizza, for some reason.

Though named after Katniss Everdeen, hunter and general badass from The Hunger Games, our cat can barely kill a cockroach and is terrified of most people (except for her two mamas, though she sometimes runs away from us when we wear shoes). She likes turkey and loves bacon. In the wee hours of the morning she likes to walk all over us making pitiful meows of hunger. In general, she is a loving little weirdo who's not very difficult to take care of.

Then we decided to move to Colorado. We hadn't moved houses in the three years since we got her (my best birthday present ever), so she'd never even relocated to a new house in the same city before...and now we had to move her across the country.

We didn't want to drop thousands of dollars on a U-Haul or air travel, so the trip proceeded in several convoluted and miserable steps:

1. Girlfriend drives halfway to Birmingham to meet up with her brother (who lives in Birmingham) and borrow his pick-up truck:
6 hours round-trip

2. I drive girlfriend's car to Denver packed with lots of crap:
7 hours to Dallas, 13 hours Dallas to Denver

You can tell a lot about a place by the type of warning sign they put up. For example, what I can tell about Texas is that I do not want to live there.

3. Girlfriend drives the pick-up truck to Denver packed with an insane amount of crap:
26 hours (apparently the trip takes longer when you don't stop for the night, your co-pilot is a shower-averse gutter punk, and your vehicle goes no faster than 60 because it's old enough to legally drink)

Meh, I think she could've fit a few more pieces of furniture in there.

4. Girlfriend and I put all our crap in a storage unit, pick out an apartment, then drive the pick-up truck from Denver to Birmingham to return it to her brother:
25 hours (oh god so much Kansas)

The storage company expressly forbid me from living in my storage unit or running a business out of it. Which is too bad, because it's the only reasonable rent in the Denver area.

5. Girlfriend and I get my beloved Honda Fit back from her brother and drive it from Birmingham to New Orleans:
5 hours

6. Why is there still so much crap? We pack, sell, or abandon the last of it, clean up and fix up the apartment (gotta get that security deposit back), and begin the final phase of the journey: driving my car to Denver with the last of the crap...and the cat:
27 hours (Driving overnight. And did I mention? With a cat.)

I hope this abuse doesn't void the warranty of my poor little Fit.

So this is a total of 109 hours between the two of us. And still, the hardest part was driving the cat.

The agony started before we even put her in the car. As we started selling our furniture and packing our belongings into boxes, the cat got increasingly distressed. All of her former hiding places were being carted off, until she was stuck crouching behind a box spring propped against a wall. When we  abandoned the poor thing to drive to Denver, she must have thought the world was ending. So when we got back to New Orleans (in Step 5), Cat expressed her concern by meowing all  night. Literally. All. Night. I am not exaggerating here. She kept us awake the entire night by walking over and around us looking confused and forlorn, keeping up an impressive level of mournful yowls. We alternated between trying to soothe her and trying to ignore her (so we could get some goddamned sleep before another day of packing and driving).

It's a good thing we love, you little asshole.

It didn't help that the little turd had gotten out of the house just days before we started our Odyssey-like mega-journey. Some people have cat allergies. I have a cat WITH allergies. She appears to be allergic to New Orleans and its wide array of insects...so by sneaking out of her posh indoor-cat lifestyle for a taste of life on the streets, she gave herself some attractive nose sores.

Despite this painful-looking allergic reaction and the fact that the underside of a house in New Orleans is a pleasant melange of dirt, trash, insects, and tetanus, she absolutely REFUSED to come out from under there and we had to grab her by the harness and literally drag her out.

So we knew the drive would be pretty special. This is what the first 2 hours sounded like: "mrowww! mrowww! mrowwwwww! mrowww. mrowww? mrow? mrow? mew? mew! mewwwww! mow. mow. mow. mrowwwr?? mrowwwwwwwr? mrow? mrow! mrowww! mrooowwww!" And so on.

It was pretty fun. Especially because the whole "driving 20+ hours straight" thing only works if the passenger sleeps while the driver drives, and then they switch. Guess how well I slept with the cat expressing her opinion for those 2 hours?

Cat, still very annoyed, in her little hidey-hole.

Finally, we let her out of the cat carrier and she hunkered down in the gap behind the driver's seat (that section is now covered in white fur, as a little souvenir of the ordeal). This allowed the driver to get some driving accomplished and the passenger to do a little sleeping. But periodically she would get concerned or just downright furious and start meowing again, prompting us to stop the car and ply her with food, water, and the litter box. Our greatest fear was that her meows were a cry for help, and that if she didn't get what she needed, she would starve, get dehydrated....or worse, shit all over the car. One time, as we were stopped by the side of the road waiting for her to take a dump in the proper receptacle, a passing motorist pulled up and asked if we needed any help. "Car trouble?" "No," my girlfriend said sheepishly. "We have a cat..."

He probably thought we were insane. He was right, of course. The cat has adjusted to our new apartment just fine: she is already hard at work tearing up the carpet and maintains a strict schedule of staring out the window at birds and passing cars. But the whole miserable process of how we got here doesn't do much to prove our sanity.