How a Furhaven Travel Bed Made Hotel Nights Easier

The first motel room Pico and I shared was in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and he spent the first hour under the desk. He is an eight-year-old Chihuahua mix who weighs nine pounds, and new rooms make him nervous. He shakes when the car first starts, and he does not settle fast in places that smell like strangers. I had brought a folded towel and an old T-shirt of mine, and I laid them on the carpet beside the bed like I had solved something. He looked at that towel the way he looks at a bath.

Here is what nobody tells you about traveling with a small dog. The room is not the problem. The floor is. Motel carpet holds years of other people's lives, and a dog who is already uneasy will pace it for an hour before he lies down. Pico circled that room until midnight. The next morning I drank bad coffee and decided I was done improvising bedding out of whatever was in the back of the car.

A few weeks later I bought the Furhaven Trail Pup travel bed, small size, and it has lived in the cargo area of my gray 2019 Subaru Forester ever since. That was twelve months ago. It comes in a stuff sack, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means the bed has a home in the car instead of sliding around loose with the grocery bags. I have pulled it out in motel rooms from Tucson to Trinidad, Colorado, and set it on the ground at picnic tables in three state parks.

The first night I used it, in a motel outside Albuquerque, I put it on the floor beside my bed and said nothing. Pico sniffed the edge, stepped on, turned around twice, and lay down. That was it. He was out in about four minutes. The reason was not complicated. I had left the bed on the living room floor at home for a week before the trip, so it already smelled like our house instead of a warehouse.

That is the whole point, and it is not really a trick. A dog who is anxious in new places does better with something familiar than with something fancy.

The bed does not make a strange room familiar. It gives him one square of floor that already is.

At 14.39 ounces, the bed weighs less than a filled water bottle, so I do not think about it when I am loading the car. It is an oval mat, 32 inches long, 26 inches wide, and 2 inches thick, and Pico at nine pounds has more room than he uses. Furhaven rates the small size for dogs up to 28 pounds. On the ground at a picnic table it keeps him off the dirt and the goatheads, which is a real concern in Arizona, and he will lie on it while I eat a sandwich and watch the trailhead.

It is washable, and I have washed it after every long trip. It goes in the laundry at home and I lay it flat to dry on the patio. The honest part is that 2 inches is not a lot of cushion. On motel carpet it is fine. On the tile floor of my sister Dolores's kitchen in Sacramento, Pico looked at it and then looked at me, and I ended up folding a blanket under it. If your dog is older or sore, treat this as a topper, not an orthopedic bed.

On the flights to Sacramento, the bed stays home. The suitcase is already tight, and Pico flies in his Sherpa carrier under the seat in front of me. I am not going to pretend the Trail Pup solves air travel, because it does not. It solves car trips and motel rooms, which is most of my travel. Twelve months in, the seams are still intact, the stuff sack still closes, and the mat has not flattened into a rag. It has been sat on, drooled on, and dragged by one corner, and it still lies flat.

If your dog is under 20 pounds and nervous in new places, this is the simplest way I have found to give him a consistent spot to land. It is also the reason I stopped hauling a second bed. One item, one job, done.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it before the trip, not on the way out of town, and to leave it on your living room floor for a week so it picks up the smell of your house. I would tell you to set it down in the motel room the minute you walk in, before you unpack, so your dog sees it as part of the room instead of something you pulled out later to calm him down. I would tell you the small size is right for a nine-pound dog and probably right up to about twenty pounds, but if you have a thirty-pound dog, check the numbers against how your dog actually sleeps, because a curled sleeper and a sprawler are not the same. And I would tell you to register the warranty with Furhaven within the fourteen days the paperwork asks for, because it takes five minutes and I have skipped that step before.