This story is from Beverly Garland, who travels across the USA with her husband and four cats.
I live in a bus currently with my husband and four cats!
In 2020, we brought my cat Galactica to live with us on a bus. We converted a second school bus to an art studio/home office for me, and a workshop for my husband. In the past two years, we’ve camped at several places around Texas with both buses, mostly on private property in the country. Sadly, in April 2020, Galactica passed away, but we also adopted more cats.
Ducky, a spicy orange tabby, wandered into our bus encampment in 2020 as a semi-feral. She was four months old. A year later, we found a tiny orange kitten wandering around at a gas station. We named the friendly affectionate little guy Gaskit. Ducky was not amused.
While property-sitting, we TNR’d a large feral colony on the property. We ended up taking in the final litter of kittens born there, a brother and sister now named Bender and Leela (from the cartoon Futurama). Once again, Ducky was not amused.
We didn’t set out to have four cats in our small space, but Bender, Leela, and Gaskit became so bonded, we couldn’t bear to separate them. We joke that they’re really Gaskit’s pets.
Ducky has grown to tolerate them. We have been taking all four for walks around the rural countryside every evening ever since we’ve had them, and they all wear little radio tracking collars.
Earlier this year, we bought a third bus on Ebay. It’s an old Greyhound-style coach, that we’ll someday convert into a new home. So we now have four cats and three buses.
Up until Covid and the full time job I took in 2020, we traveled thousands of miles annually in one of the buses. We’d go between Texas (my home state) and Chicago (my husband’s homebase), and then make an annual trip to Burning Man in Nevada, carrying passengers and their gear from Chicago to the event and back. We’d make a long road trip out of it and do lots of camping and hiking together on the way back to Chicago.
We didn’t have any cats on board for the trip because 1) it wouldn’t have been a safe traveling situation for the cats, and 2) my
husband was allergic to cats at the time. Back when I moved into the bus with my now-husband, he was extremely allergic to cats. My husband credits Galactica with healing what it was that made him allergic to cats, which allowed us to bring her to live with us during the Covid lockdown starting in 2020 until she died at age 17, a year later. It was with her that our tradition of nightly walks with the cats began.
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