Preface To Laundry: When Moving, Laundry Is The Least Of Your Worries

For real.

To move from Lexington, Kentucky, to Los Angeles, California, is already no mean feat.  To do it with seven animals (besides the two humans involved) is almost too overwhelming.

I've been planning the four-day route.  We'll drive over two thousands miles, in two vehicles (one of these some kind of moving truck), & I figure we can probably handle eight-hour-a-day drives.  That means covering over five hundred miles a day & then stopping to find a place to close our eyes for the night & maybe even find vegan food to eat.

The last is going to be tough, when the places we'll stay are, in order, Springfield, Missouri; Amarillo, Texas; & Flagstaff, Arizona.  I wish we could just hit bigger cities - the hotels would probably be cleaner, & there'd be a better chance places like Whole Foods stores where you can get pre-packaged vegan food.

& the hotels!  I guess I'm glad to be living in a world where you can read hotel reviews online, which wasn't something I could do when I started driving around the country over twenty years ago, but the reviews are marvelously inconsistent.  & why not?  Everyone has different levels of tolerance.  Remind me one day to tell you of the fight the wife & I had when she booked a very cheap hotel in Piccadilly Circus in London.

The pets - the pets whom I love so much & without whom I couldn't live - the pets are the biggest concern.  Four cats in tiny cages in a fast car (or truck) eight hours a day is hard enough.  Two of them have health issues (as I have written about before) that concern me in my everyday world; the two of them also eat throughout the day, which they won't be able to do in a car.  How I will worry.

Traveling with pets means pet need to stay in motels.  The worst motels are usually the ones that don't mind pets.  & why not?  Everyone & everything is welcome in the worst motels on earth!

I just told a neighbor that we'll basically be on a kind of autopilot the entire way - we'll be exhausted, we'll be on edge, we'll be anxious.  But we'll also be determined.  It's a trip we hopefully only have to make one time.  At least for a while.