Car travel tips please

[doingwhatican]

We’re driving from London to Glasgow soon, over two days, with a 10 month old poodle and a six year old child. The dog will be in the back seat with the child. Any tips? How often should we stop for breaks? We’ve not done a long drive before so should be interesting. Please tell me dogs like to sleep on long car journeys. Thanks!

Depends on the dog...

My dog can only go an hour between breaks or he throws up everywhere, that’s been slowly built up... ‘‘tis fun, lol.

What’s the dog like normally in the car?

We’ve only really done short trips and she’s been fine. Quite likes sitting on top of the child, then eventually settles down.

First of all, and I'm sure you have one, make sure your dog is wearing a seat belt harness. We regularly do a 12 over 2 day drive with our dog, since she was 4 months old, as we stop every 2 hours to change drivers we would normally let her out for a quick leg stretch/pee then.

We drove to Portugal this summer with our pup who was 9 months at the time, it took us 24 hours straight door to door and we didn't stop in a hotel. He slept basically the entire way, didn't want his own food just some of the chicken nuggets I'd brought for us! He sat on the back seat attached to a seat belt harness, I put blankets and his bed on the back seat and he moved around and got comfy as he needed to. Overnight we didn't stop for about 5/6 hours and he was fine as he does this in the night anyway and in the day we stopped every 3 hours or so to switch drivers and have a little walk. Good luck!

With any of the long trips I've done, I've pre planned places we can stop for a good walk, run about or something similar and built time into the schedule to allow for that.

I've tried to do that every couple of hours so a recent trip back from Devon to the midlands has involved a stop of with family and a run about in their garden, a stop at a National Trust forest for a good walk and a little ad-hoc stop in a residential area for a 30 min walk about the streets just because he was getting fidgety.

Depends on the dog. Depends on the roads. Depends on the time of day.

I plan on stopping every 2-3 hrs but have been known on a long journey to stretch that further - our dog has the bladder of a super-tanker and she will sleeps for hours at a stretch on the motorway.

If your dog pees six times a day normally, then you'll need to make more stops than for a dog that pees three times a day.

Thanks everyone for these tips. I guess we’ll find out soon enough!

On our first big trip with BiteyDog we stopped every hour to 90 mins to give him a short break. On the way back we only stopped every 2.5 hours as he was used to the long journey then.

When you're on a long trip how/when do you feed your dogs? We regularly do 6-8 hours with stops every 2 hours max. Normally they have 2 good sized meals a day as they're very active but just give them small amounts at each stop to avoid a large meal, one has a tendency to throw at some point on the trip (but not always), I don't want to not feed her as it seems mean, what would the advice in my situation? Thanks

*throw up