Lou0403 wrote:Thanks for the reply. I have one of those cages that I used to use in my car. However, it is so heavy that I have trouble handling it even when it's folded up. Could you get to the back of the RV when the cage was set up?
I was fast and loose with the facts when I wrote my previous post.
Original setup: B190, free range cat. This is what I recommend against. The cat didn't much like it either.
Post-accident setup: B190, cat in a normal, smallish carrier (basically room for cat only). This worked for shorter trips. When the accident happened, we had a longer trip to the Outer Banks planned a few weeks later, and we took it right after we got the B190 back, but that was our last long trip in it before we sold the van. I think we left him loose for that trip.
The cat in question (Snowball) passed away last year, and now we have two other cats.
Current setup with the truck: Dog cage/custom cages (made out of wood and metal fencing). The cage is large enough to hold a small bed and small litterbox, and we bought some bowls for bird cages to put food and water in (not much of either). So, I never used the dog cage setup in the B190.
The dog cage we have is
this one, small size, I think. It really doesn't weigh that much, though of course it'd be more with the cat loaded. The cage itself might be ~20 lbs. I think there would be enough room to get past the cage into the van while on the road. In fact, my only concern would be figuring out how to secure the cage to keep it from sliding around. You could build a custom cage like we did, but our custom cages don't fold down, so it'd be more headache at the campsite. (If we need the room in the cab of the truck, we can always put our cages in the bed of the truck. You wouldn't have that option with the B190.)
Here you can see Snowball looking out over the mountains from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, to give you an idea of the size of the cage:
When we first adopted the second cat, we bought one of
these (although ours is tan, not bright orange) and put in a litter box and small combination food/water bowl. It worked size-wise, but we weren't able to secure it to our back seat very well, so it bounced around a lot, scaring the kitty. It would work fine on the floor of the van, though.
There are lots of options. As you can probably tell we've spent a LOT of time thinking about this.
This reminds me, we replaced our truck last August and now we need to build two new custom cages...