First Travel Day

Our first park site!

Yesterday was First Travel Day, and it was exhausting. We spent our first night in the RV, just right on the street by our house, and nobody slept that well but hey, we did it! That was the easy part. Now everything else has to come in, and do so in time for us to hitch up (for only the second time), load the cats (for one of their few drives), navigate out of the neighborhood (much harder than getting in), and drive our new home with all our possessions down the road.

The moving was tough, there was a great deal more stuff than we realized, but what we ran out of first was creativity. RVs, more so than houses, are full of storage spaces that are just bullshit. In a good RV, maybe half the spaces are like, nice, meaning well-proportioned, well-placed, and easily accessed. That leaves half the spaces failing on one of those dimensions. Most of the time you can work around it with some little storage bins or shelves or command hooks. Sometimes drilling or cutting if you're bold. But you're not going to fit a household of stuff in here without a lot of creative racking, stacking, stowing, and experimenting. That's tiresome! We were maybe 70% loaded when Kristin was plain out of gas for stuffing things in. Plus we had to save some energy for actually driving all this stuff to the RV park, and do so before dark.

So while Kristin was off teaching a couple music lessons over Zoom (no, she didn't take the day off!) I hitched up with some help from the kids and a lot of help from checklists. We checked things over and made ready, then we brought the cats out of the house and into the truck. We planned a route while the cats settled in a little.

This is where things got out of hand. The cats did NOT want to be in the truck, it was not familiar, it needed investigating, climbing on, and crying about. Our weeks of not bringing the cats in there for lack of time/resources was coming home to roost. I think I got the rig pulled forward into the street once before it became clear that having them loose in the cabin was not going to work. With Kristin out spotting, there weren't enough hands to deal with 2 cats, so we pulled to the side and dug the backup cardboard carriers out of the master bedroom. These we knew weren't perfect but could be made to work for this short trip.

They didn't. Desmond fought his way out in a matter of minutes. Brubeck though, he just sat in his and cried. Audrey was in tears at this point and I almost was too. Luke was a champ and held Desmond's harness with an iron grip. Audrey got out to help Kristin with spotting while Luke handled Desmond and I drove the rig. It took 20 minutes to go 5 blocks at a walking pace, but we did it, and hit no cars, trees or curbs. We made it out of the neighborhood and the girls got back in. Kristin relieved Luke on Desmond duty, and we scooted down the highways to the RV park, now only about 15 minutes away. It was tense. The route was not particularly difficult, but I'm new at driving, and the cats even more so. Everyone was on edge. If we can just get into the park and get the RV set up, we can get these bundles of claws and teeth out of our arms and inside. They like being in the RV, they've spent more time in there and most importantly, it's enclosed without being full of fragile leather upholstery like the car.

Thankfully check-in and parking was relatively fast, it was a pull-through site with decent clearance. I have no idea how long it actually took as time had become meaningless by this point, but it felt decently fast. We leveled, extended the slides, and collapsed inside. I think it was 6pm by this point.

So I turned around and got back in the truck to pick up dinner, thinking the whole way how I regret not trying harder to find a friend who could take in the cats while we were away. This lifestyle is hard enough, and adding to it sharp, messy animals in your space all the time might be too much. The litterbox issue alone is almost enough to make me leave them home. But it's complicated. The cats have been part of our lives for a long time. For now, the plan is to get a carrier large enough for both of them but small enough to fit in the truck cab, and see how they do on the trip to Seattle. If that goes horribly, maybe I start asking around for a long-term cat sitter that can take them when we come back through Portland. If it goes well, maybe they come with us. If it's tough but doable... we'll see. Unfortunately if we get like, 3 months into this and travel with them is still horrible, we may have to give them up entirely which would be heartbreaking. But the reality is this year is bigger than the cats, and nobody wants to drag them along if they hate it. Sad cats are not fun pets.