Have you seen the film doctor Doolittle with Eddie Murphy he puts his daughters Guinea pig in a cage strapped to the roof. First thing that came to mind after reading this. It is a very funny seen the said animal's face is stretched like its suffering from the g-force. Sorry not helpful to this particular thread but thought it was funny and wanted to share it.

I am shipping my two dogs over by car. The cost of sending them by BA is £600 plus some sort of handling fee of about £100 each cheaper to go by car and get a light sedative so they sleep most of the way.

Like I said above, road/chunnel transport is a far better option for an elderly cat. Ours is 18 years old, also going on 18 months sometimes and the vet was very reticent to prescribe any sedatives and recommended against flying him over.

So, we put his cat box and cat bed in the back of the car, along with a bunch of our valuables that we didn't want to transport (Nissan Primera 5 door, rear seats down, wife and I in front) and set off.

The cat box was in case the cat got unruly, but we were hoping he would use his bed (more like a cat cave, really). As it turned out he didn't use either. He climbed ontop of the rear load, which was covered over with sleeping bags etc. and nestled in. Since the load was near to the car roof, he was well hidden, although he could see out the back, front and sides by crawling to different places strategically - or simply hide in the centre if the going got rough.

We stopped about every two to three hours, put a dog harness on him (cat harnesses are just too puny to fit an older cat), fed and watered him outside the car and took him for walks, where he did his thing, from time to time. We stopped at the quiet service areas, with plenty of trees and bushes. I would say that a mess tray was not needed at all and we didn't take one anyway. Generally, we found that the cat did not eat, or drink, much during the trip (we took dry and wet food).

The cat developed a liking for my (Driver's) footwell, every time we stopped and we did have a couple of occasions where he attempted to get into it when we were doing 90 mph down the motorway, but my wife kept him out. However, he did manage to claw my back once, whilst attempting to out-manouevre her.

Prior to the trip I took the cat out in the car nearly every day for two weeks, so that he would figure out that getting in the car did not mean thermometer up butt time

Stops during the journey were about 15/30 minutes for rest and pee breaks and 1/2 hours for power-snooze breaks, where the cat also had time to rest and nap, since most of the journey he was very alert whilst we were on the move.

We started out from the UK around 6 am, crossing the chunnel around 9 am, spending the night in the car in the Southern French mountains (in a blizzard with far too much snow to carry on driving), parking up at around 2 am the following day. That's where the sleeping bags came in real handy, keeping us warm until 6 am, when the blizzard had stopped and the snow ploughs were moving.

Sometime around mid-day, the cat had clearly settled-in to the routine - having experienced an early morning romp in the snow and blizzard, he obviously knew it couldn't get any worse . By 8 pm that day we arrived at our destination in Murcia.

I have driven UK to Spain, via France, probably a dozen times (with minimal stops) and many years ago I promised myself I would never do it again. We did the Portsmouth Bilbao ferry and drive across Spain a couple of times after, but I decided to do the drive across France one last time for the sake of the cat and found it quite a reasonable trip, since the cat forced us to make regular stops and take regular breaks.

The most amusing memories I have of the trip are my wife pulling the cat off my shoulders, whilst I was trying drive and grit my teeth through the pain; the cat coming back into the car completely covered in snow; the cat clinging onto the sleeping bags, paws splayed out and swinging from side-to-side as we overtook other cars; and the look on people's faces as they say us go by with this cat looking out of the back window at them.

Hi.!!

when we moved to south spain I spend weeks trying to find a company to ship over all as it was the cheapest option but I found out most of them would not do it to mainland spain!!! the lorries where off as you have to rent the all carriage, and they mix you up with all this different measures..etc...at the end we rented a huge van and did it ourselves it took us a day from the Uk to south Spain and bough all our valuables items... at least for us!!! The kids took a flight with their grandmother!!!quiet an adventure it was......