Cats in the car

Over spring break we decided to drive to Florida. My mom was on spring break the week before and so she drove up here. The car was packed. We also decided to bring our two cats with us. It was an adventure to say the least. They didn’t like the car for the first couple hours. They adapted really well. It went a lot better than I expected. They spent the time being held and in carriers. They weren’t locked in them. They enjoyed sitting in them. We had quite a bit of traffic that made the drive a few hours longer than expected. Stormy and Charlie did great. I was a very proud mom. Noah hadn’t thrown up, so I was happy about that. He started taking car sickness medicine last summer.

We arrived at our pet friendly hotel and got the cats out of their carriers in the bathroom. We went to go pick up food to bring back and just relax. We were all exhausted. After going to two places to get food, we go to the room. We put them in the bathroom as a safe place where they couldn’t get under the furniture or behind anything. Noah opened the bathroom door and said that he couldn’t find Charlie. We thought he was joking or Charlie was in the bath tub. My mom went and looked, and Charlie was gone. My mom looked under the counter and noticed a hole in the wall. We really thought that we would never see him again.

We were panic stricken. We were crying. We called the front desk. We were afraid he was crawling around in the walls somewhere. The maintenance man came to help. He had to make the hole bigger to get Charlie out. We were told that he was still in the bathroom. We didn’t know what was going on. Charlie bit and scratched the maintenance man a lot. He was visibly bleeding. I felt bad that he was being hurt. Finally, Charlie was out. He ran and tried to climb up the wall. Charlie was traumatized. No one slept well that night. We still had ten more hours of driving the next day. Charlie and Stormy were not getting along for about two days after. They were growling and hissing at each other. They had never acted that way. Thankfully they are friends again. I never want to travel with those cats again.