RVing with Cats: Taking Your Adventure Pets on the Road

There are many well-documented health benefits of owning cats or other pets. Perhaps most obviously, they provide companionship. Life on the road can be lonely, especially when you first start, and bringing along a feline friend is a great way to reduce loneliness. Life on the road can also be stressful. You can’t always count on a spectacular sunset or breathtaking view to calm your nerves. Cats are a great source of comfort and stress relief, and they’re great for your overall happiness and well-being

But most importantly, cats, like most pets, are part of the family. When you hit the road, you want your family there with you. Cats do bring some unique challenges, though. There isn’t a single right answer for how to address those challenges, but we hope that sharing our problems and solutions can help other RVers feel more confident and comfortable traveling with their cats.

My partner Sushila and I adopted our two cats, Ollie and Mango, while living our sticks-and-bricks life. When we decided to hit the road in an RV, we knew they’d be joining us.

Where to Put the Litter Box?

If you have cats and are planning to take them on the road, your first thought was almost certainly, “what will I do with the litter box.” They’re messy, smelly, and, especially in a tiny space, they can really get in the way.

One of our big goals was to not need to move the litter box on travel days. Our first six months on the road included a lot of those (oops), and we have enough to pick up and move out of the way without the litter box adding to it. We were also a little concerned that moving the litter box around, especially on moving days, would cause additional stress for the cats, and we wanted to avoid that possibility.

Our second goal was to minimize the mess the cats could make tracking litter around the RV. If you own cats, you’re probably laughing at how futile this effort was, but nevertheless, the fewer times per day I need to vacuum litter, the better.

We travel in a fifth wheel, and we opted to carve out a space in our basement (the pass-through storage area under the bedroom) to keep the litter box. We cut a hole in the steps leading to our bedroom, and a walkway leads the cats to an enclosed space in the basement for the litter box.

There are a couple downsides to this approach. First, we lost some high-value space from our primary storage area. Second, it required extra effort at the start to build an enclosure for the litter box that could keep the cats from roaming free in the RV’s underbelly. For us, the benefits far outweighed the costs.

The biggest benefit is that the litter box is out of the way. It has a dedicated space that is usable and accessible whether we’re stationary or on the move. Importantly, we can access the litter box by opening our outside storage bin, and this greatly reduces the mess associated with scooping litter. It also reduces smells inside the RV living space. Finally, it helps reduce the litter that is tracked into the RV since the cats are forced to walk a few feet across a litter-catching pad before they are back inside.

While our particular setup is pretty specific to fifth wheels, we’ve seen similar setups in Class A’s using a hole through the floor or Class C’s with a space under the bed. If you can find a way to give the litter box a dedicated space where it doesn’t encroach on your living space, it can go a long way to making traveling with your cats more comfortable.

Making the RV Interior Cat-Friendly

If your cats are anything like ours, they prefer to find the highest spot available to look down on us and sleep. Our sticks and bricks home had a couple good perches for them, and we wanted to give them the same thing in the RV. Our fifth wheel has a large back window that is the perfect place to mount a cat bed. Of course, we also want to be able to close the window shades at night. A suction-cup window seat seemed like a good option; however, we quickly discovered that sticking and unsticking the suction cups every day rapidly decreased their ability to stay on the window. Instead, we slightly modified the bed so we could easily disconnect it from the suction cups, leaving them stuck to the window, so we can close the shades. It is a low maintenance solution for us, and it’s our cats’ favorite place to lounge.

Outdoor Access for RV Cats

Some cats are perfectly happy spending their entire lives indoors. Ours certainly seemed to be prior to RVing. We tried taking them outside a few times, and to say it went poorly is an understatement. We know it’s important for our cats to be active, though, and we know that environmental enrichment is important for their wellbeing. The RV doesn’t provide much space for either, so we persisted in training them to enjoy the outdoors.

We started small. A few minutes of harness training here and there; a few minutes of sitting on the RV steps. Before long, they were used to the harnesses and hooked on exploring outside. They come running to the door when they hear the Velcro of their harnesses now. They love going for walks and exploring our ever-changing surroundings.

Their love of the outdoors turned into a bit of a problem, though. Our lives and locations don’t always allow for much outdoor time, and the longer we go without taking them out, the more likely it becomes that they’ll sneak out the door and go for an adventure on their own.

We started searching for solutions that would allow the cats some outdoor time and space even when we can’t take them out for walks.

We had a few requirements:

• The cats should be safe when We can’t always be watching, and we’ve already had a dog go through our screen door trying to chase the cats.
• It needed to be compact and We don’t have a lot of space, and we’re closer to our weight limit than we’d like to be.
• No more holes in the We added enough when we installed solar. We really didn’t want more sources for leaks.

We searched for a commercial solution, but nothing quite fit the bill. Cat tents wouldn’t be safe unattended. A metal enclosure would be safe, but it would either need to be prohibitively large to reach any of our available windows, or it would need new mounting points in the side of the RV.

Making A Catio for Your RVing Cats

Instead of trying to adapt one of the existing products, we designed our own outdoor enclosure: the Catio!

It uses 1” PVC pipes for the frame. A few key joints are glued together for stability, but the rest can be easily disassembled for storage. The floor is an outdoor carpet that can be removed and rolled up. The whole thing is wrapped in screen door mesh which is strong enough to keep the cats in but otherwise light and compact. The whole assembly sits between our two slides and is held in place by gravity. The cats can access the catio from our bedroom window.

The cats love it! They can nap in the sun, and they can hear and watch the birds. It gives them an opportunity to safely go outside whenever they’d like. It has been enriching for the cats and rewarding for us.

Traveling with our cats has been very rewarding. Trying to keep both them and us comfortable seemed a bit challenging at first, but with a few modifications to the RV, we’ve been able to give them many of their creature comforts while keeping it easy and low maintenance for ourselves.

There are many easy ways to make space for them in your RV. It will be worth it for both you and them.