Monday Mario

It's been almost a year since Boyfriend and I packed up our car and drove from NYC to San Francisco. We didn't have an apartment in SF, we didn't have jobs in SF...We just decided to take a leap of faith and see what we could find over here. Of course, Mario had to come along with us, too. We spent two weeks driving across country with just a loose idea of major sites we wanted to hit. We didn't have a hard and fast timeline. We didn't have hotel reservations.

My main concern was Mario. Most hotels didn't allow pets or charged a ludicrous pet fee. At one hotel where we paid about $80 for the night, they wanted a $75 pet fee. I could have gotten Mario his own room for that price! So we resorted to sneaking him in and out of the hotels. We declared him at one hotel that advertised that "Pets stay for free," but the room smelled like wet dog and Mario seemed rather disturbed (probably from the scent of the other animals).

Rabbits are luckily very quiet. I got Mario a fancy pet carrier which had the benefit of not immediately looking like a carrier from a distance. It also had a metal grill vs. the mesh ones that many carriers have (that bunnies can make short work of with their teeth). We kept him in the regular old plastic carrier in the car, though.

I brought along enough panels from his regular cage to be able to erect a mini-cage in the hotels. Between his cage, litter box, hay bin, two carriers, and a paper shredder to shred newspapers for his litter box, the majority of the backseat was filled with Mario's stuff.

First hotel in Washington D.C. (this was the place that wanted Mario to pay a fee equivalent to getting his own room)

Mario was wonderful with his litter box skills. I know a lot of times when bunnies are in a new environment they need a quick refresher course. But Mario always knew where his box was. I'd let him run around the hotel rooms at night when I could supervise him closely and I'd bring his box out of his cage. He would always hop right in to do his business no matter where it was placed.

Sometimes we improvised with his enclosure

Are we there yet?

The hardest thing to choreograph was our own sightseeing. I didn't want to leave Mario in the car for hours as we saw the sights. So we had to plan it so that in areas that there was a lot to see, we stayed overnight so Mario could be in the hotel room. The only place we couldn't work this was at the Grand Canyon. In certain states it was actually quite chilly in September so if we had to leave him in the car for a little bit while we ate lunch I wasn't too worried. But in Arizona it was hot and not the weather to leave him stuck in the car. So Mario went into his special carrier and got to see the Grand Canyon.