Retrospective: Pippin is Reluctant to Go Travelling

Most of the times I drove to the family reunion ten hours away, Pippin was perfectly content to be in his carseat, looking out the window or trying to sleep. I say "trying" because while he was perfectly able to sleep the entire ten hours, I rapidly discovered that if I let him sleep the whole trip, when we got there and I wanted to sleep, all he wanted to do was play. Since we'd be in a single room either in a relative's house or a hotel room, having him playing even by himself was disruptive to my sleep, and he never wanted to play by himself if I was available to help.

2006: Hotel room halfway there.
Pippin just hanging out on the hotel's
air conditioning unit.

I actually found this out thusly: We were coming home. This was when I was still using two days and a hotel stay halfway through to drive the ten hours. When I came off the tollbooth, I had to roll down the window and hand money to a (gasp!) stranger! Pippin dived off his carseat and under the actual car seat, wedging himself underneath.

Since getting him out from under was going to require stopping the car and getting a better angle on dragging him out, I just let him stay there. He fell asleep to the hum of the wheels and stayed there all five hours to the hotel. And then he wanted to play all night long.

2006: This is what he looked like in his carseat

I learned after that one incident to reach over and poke him periodically to wake him up. I also learned to put his harness on him and strap him into the carseat (stop envisioning a human toddler in a carseat--he could move around, just not leave the seat) before paying tolls!

Well, after a few years of splitting up the trip, I started doing the whole thing in one long drive. Coming to that same toll road on the way there one year, I sort of, er, headed the wrong direction. I didn't realize it until a half an hour had passed and I drove through a tunnel.

I didn't remember tunnels on the way to my relatives. Oops. I've gone the wrong direction. Well, looky there, they've very nicely put places to turn around and go the other direction without getting off the toll road. Paved and straight even, not the kind of paved but angled down and up ones that they have on interstates for just police cars and stuff, and they're angled that way so they flip cars trying to cross it fast.

So I really thought these flat paved cross-overs were really for people like me who'd headed the wrong way. I used one to turn around and go back the way I'd come. Only later, after the trip was over, I found out from my dad that no, you're supposed to get off the toll road, pay, turn around, get back on, and pay at the other end. For many years I felt very guilty about the dollar fifty I owed the toll road but as I could never figure out how to pay them, I finally gave up feeling guilty about it.

Anyway, this meant that my trip was now an hour longer since I'd gone half an hour out of the way and half an hour back. Pippin by now knew how long the trip was going to take, so when we reached the ten hour mark he started getting mildly restless. Not a lot, just enough to tell that he thought we should be there by now.

After I got off the toll road (in the correct location, I'll have you know) I got lost again. Two roads diverged in a (town) and I, I took the one less traveled by, as I discovered when I ended up in the middle of farmland, the kind where there's a farmhouse every five miles or so.

Sigh. At this point I knew that retracing my steps was going to be longer than finding where I was and designing a new route from here, so I stopped the car in a corner lot (I believe it was an abandoned gas station or something like that) and got the GPS and the laptop out of the trunk (yes, so long ago that the GPS was a separate unit) and started figuring stuff out.

Pippin watched all this, and after a while, said, "me-ow?" in an inquisitive tone of voice.

"Yes, we're lost," I said absentmindedly, my eyes focused on the screen.

A pause, and then a rather more impatient, "me-ow!"

"No, I don't know where we are," I said in exasperation. "I'm trying to get us there!"

A rather sulky "maow" greeted this, as if to say, "I was only asking."

So I looked up to find myself greeted with stiff cat back as he was pointedly looking out the window. I apologized for being cranky (after eleven hours of driving and getting lost twice it was rather frustrating) and for snapping at him.

As always, he forgave me quite quickly. He wasn't really even mad at me. Just wanted to get my attention and be reassured that I knew where we were and what was going on.

---

But the time he was really reluctant to go traveling was the time all three of us groups was going to the family reunion. My parents were driving in their car, my brother and his wife in their car, and me and Pippin in my car. We weren't precisely caravanning, as we'd all left at different times that morning, depending on our routines, but we were all traveling on the same roads on the same day. My mom had lent me her cell phone since I didn't have one back then, so we were all able to be connected.

Pippin, for whatever reason, just did not feel like going on a long car trip that day. He was a pain, moving restlessly around in his seat, threatening to come down out of it just short of the point at which he'd get the harness put back on.

That's how I trained him to stay put. He didn't like wearing his harness. So if he stayed in his carseat (with one exception I'll tell you about in a second) he didn't have to wear it. If he didn't stay put, I put the harness on and wrapped the leash around the car's seat's headrest so he'd have to stay put.

He was allowed to come be on my lap on long road trips under the following conditions: he had to ask, and I had to say yes. I only said yes when I had long stretches of interstate with very little traffic and no exits I had to take for a long time.

The difficulty I've had getting the harness on Max makes me realize just how special Pippin was. I could put his harness on him one-handed, while I was driving so barely looking at him.

Anyway, Pippin was pushing the limits of "staying put" and just generally being obnoxious. This of course was a far cry from how obnoxious a cat can be in a car, but for him, it was unusual.

Then my sister-in-law called to check in. Pippin heard her voice on the phone and came diving down out of his car seat, across my lap, to where I held the phone in my left hand to my (left, obviously) ear, and started meowing most insistently.

We could only conclude that he was saying, "Help me, help me, get me out of here, she's gone crazy and plans to drive all day again!"

2006 on a far more contented trip

Pippin had long since proved he would not use a litterbox in a moving car. He would simply hold it until we got to our destination (thus adding a little more emphasis to his wanting to know if we were there yet in the story above. He'd held it for eleven hours, one more hour than usual, and really needed to know how much longer).

I thought maybe he was so restless because I'd dragged him out to the car and started the trip before he'd had a chance to empty his bladder that morning. Maybe he had to go to the bathroom?

So when we got to the gas station to put gas in the car, after I'd done that I parked the car in the far corner of the lot away from all the noise (or as "away" as I could get) where there were trees and sandy soil. I thought perhaps the sandy soil might be enough like his litter that he would go. I put his harness on him and took him to the sandy spot, putting him down where my body blocked the way back to all the cars and people and noise.

He didn't go. I wasn't entirely surprised. He was never an outdoor cat, and he was very good about using a litter box and nothing else, so I didn't really think he'd go outdoors. But I had to at least give him a chance. Just because I thought he'd be one way doesn't mean a pressing bladder couldn't change his mind.

But after this, he was good as gold. Sat in his carseat like a model citizen, didn't say a word, acted like a completely different cat (the travelling version I was used to).

I think, although I'm not sure, that he thought when I put him on the ground, that I was doing the human to cat equivalent of the human to small human "if you don't behave yourself you can just walk home!"

Although I felt slightly guilty about making him think that I might make him walk home, because I would never ever do that any more than the parent would do that to their human child, I was guiltily grateful that it made him behave! Even if I hadn't meant it that way.