Our kitties are quite spoiled. If you own a pet, you know all about wanting to take good care of your furry family members and we are no exception. That's why when we made the big move to New Orleans from Amarillo, I drove my car with the kitties and Kevin drove the giant truck by himself.
Alice decided that the back of the car by the speakers was to be her spot the entire trip. It was not a big deal until she decided to get sick down the back of the seat. I guess our "little girl" gets carsick. Poor baby. (See Kevin driving the truck behind us?)
Another interesting thing they both started doing in the car was panting. Now I am used to seeing dogs pant. That's what doggies do. But to see the kitties pant was kind of frightening. I felt like we were in the African desert and there was about to be a stampede or something. Guess that's what we get for moving to the deep south. Heat and panting cats. Very odd.
Here is fluffy, pretty Oliver. He knows he is pretty and tells us this every day. He's particularly happy in this picture - it was Christmas and we had just given them their stocking full of toys. Like I said before, our cats are spoiled.
Alice was, for the most part, pretty chill on the trip. Other than panting and throwing up, she did awesome! Oliver, of course, was another story. We drove to Austin the first day of the trip and stayed with my brother Chris. By the time we had arrived in Austin, Oliver had managed to climb in and out of my lap repeatedly. He also thought it was great fun to try and get into my floorboard and under my feet. It might not have been that big of a deal, except I drive a stick shift and having a cat under your feet while you are trying to shift in rush hour traffic is simply dangerous.
This upset our little prince immensely and he retaliated by smearing poop on me. Gotta love that Oliver! By the time we showed up at Chris's house, I was covered in cat hair and smelled like poop. Yuck!
I decided that we should keep Oliver in the pet carrier for the second day of the trip. But I knew that he would freak out even worse if he realized he was stuck in a cage all day. Therefore, we gave him a tiny, tiny bit of Benadryl before we put him in the carrier. Except when we did that, he started oozing pink foam out of his mouth and was quite angry. I cleaned him up with a wash cloth and helped Kevin wrestle him into his carrier. I figured he really didn't ingest enough of the medicine to really affect him because he was screaming his head off for the first 15 minutes of the trip out of Austin.
Then, it was silent. And he was KNOCKED OUT! I then started having major remorse for doing something so evil to my cat child. I kept on calling his name and trying to wake him up and would occasionally get a weak "arrggg" out of him. I got used to this and was ok with the situation until I started smelling cat pee. (And let me just say, I will take cat poop over cat pee any day.) We stopped at a gas station and I let him out of the carrier to stretch his paws and maybe go to the bathroom (they had a litter box in the back seat), except when he came out of the carrier, he was covered in pee. YUCK. GROSS. GAG!
Luckily, he was still pretty drugged up and didn't fight me going back into the carrier (we cleaned it out first, of course!). We still had about 5 1/2 hours left in our trip and I was just hoping that the medicine would keep him quiet - this cat has some lungs on him - until we could get to our hotel in NOLA.
However, about 2 hours later he woke up. And boy was he angry! I didn't know how I was going to take 3 1/2 more hours of a screaming, smelly cat. So Kev and I stopped at a truck stop and bought liquid Children's Benadryl. And the foaming and the upset started all over again. But it knocked him out again and we were good for the rest of the trip.
Except, he smelled like pee. And he knew it and we knew it and we had to do something about it. So, Oliver got his first people bath since he was a kitten.
And all was right with the world once again.
