5 Tips for Road Tripping with a Dog

“Life is short and the world is wide.” 

I adore traveling, and I’m obsessed with my dog…. but rarely do I combine the two. Typically when I travel, my pup goes off to play at the “pet resort” with her friends. Considering my dog gets anxious in new environments and isn’t great in the car, I find that it’s usually easier to leave her at her normal kennel spot (and I’ve got the pet resort bills to prove that I do this often!).

However, when my husband and I moved 3,000 miles from California to the northeast in August/September, we elected to send all of our stuff in a pod and drive my car cross-country – our pup in tow. I was a bit nervous for our sanity with having our dog in the car with us for 45 hours, but we survived! Harley also became a much better passenger during the trip than she was prior to it (though it seems like she has since reverted back to whining for the window to be open at all times, even in really hot and very chilly temperatures – *insert eye roll*).

There were several things that I think helped Harley be at ease and comfortable during our road trip, so I thought that I’d share them with you today. We continue to do a few of these things now that we’re living closer to family and going on many (much shorter) weekend road trips with my pup with us. I hope that these tips help some of you dog owners who are planning to bring your pup along on a road trip!

Use the BringFido app. My cousin recommended this app to me right before our trip, and I used it a ton throughout our journey. The BringFido app allows users to enter any city or town in (or at least, every single place we visited yielded results) and be able to find pet-friendly hotels, restaurants, parks and activities. Since this was a long trip and I didn’t pre-book hotels beforehand, the app was really helpful in finding accommodations last minute, and it even tells you if there are applicable extra pet fees and if bigger dogs are allowed. I also used Bring Fido a lot to find nearby parks to take my dog for a walk or hike. It also has a Yelp-like feature that allows users to rate each item (with 1-5 bones instead of stars, obviously) and leave reviews, which I found helpful.

Exercise your pup right before you start driving each day. Speaking of walks and hikes, I knew beforehand that it was key to get my steps in with my pup before we set off on our drive for the day. Getting a daily walk in tired her out and made her more relaxed in the car, and I also was happy to get in some exercise each and every day of the trip. It also gave us the opportunity to see a bit more of the cities we didn’t spend much time in.

Bring treat & toy distractions. I brought a bag of all of Harley’s stuff with us on the trip, including treats, Kong toys and peanut butter. If she was ever being really antsy and whiney in the car, I would whip out the toy and throw some peanut butter or a treat in there to keep her busy (I feel like this is the same thing that moms do for their kiddos, because it works for both little humans and dogs!). Clearly I’m not above bribery… but hey, it serves as a good distraction for food-motivated dogs who are carrying on just because they’ve been in the car for 4 hours.

Bring your dog’s bed in the car. Another thing we did was place Harley’s bed in the backseat where she usually sits directly on the car’s seat, and I think it encouraged her to lay down and relax more. At first she refused to nap at all in the car, but as the days went on, she started to get used to the long driving days and was comfy enough to snooze.

Tip: If your pet is a medium or large dog, chances are good that their bed won’t lay properly in the backseat and half of it will likely droop into the foot area. We remedied this by placing items like our bag of snacks underneath the bed, which propped it up so that she could curl up in her bed comfortably.

Use the Hotel Tonight app for dog-friendly last minute hotel bookings. The other app that I relied on a lot during our cross-country trip was HotelTonight. The app provides last-minute hotel accommodations at discounted rates, and there’s a filter that enables users to specify dog-friendly places only. While some if the deals weren’t better than an Orbitz type of booking site, we got a few really good deals, including my favorite hotel of the trip, Mountain Shadows Ranch in Paradise Valley, AZ. In fact, when I extended our hotel stay in a couple different cities, I could only rebook at the same rate via the app because the hotel itself couldn’t offer me as low of a rate directly.

I’d recommend using Hotel Tonight for last minute getaways and road trips, whether or not you have a dog with you!

Tell me… Any other tips that you have for road tripping with a dog? Have you ever done a long distance trip with any type of pet?