EarthRoamer Life with Pets: Tips for Living & Traveling With Dogs

Traveling with dogs makes everything so much more fun. It also makes full-time life on the road a little harder and gives us a lot more to think about, but we wouldn’t trade it for anything.

We’re lucky because both of our dogs travel really well. Neither of them gets carsick, and once the truck is moving, they usually fall asleep. They’re great travel companions, which makes the actual driving part pretty easy.

The harder part is figuring out how to make everyday life in the EarthRoamer work for them.

One of the first things we figured out was how to give them some freedom around camp. Campgrounds usually require dogs to be on a leash, and even if we’re dispersed camping one of our dogs (ahem, Porter) has terrible recall so we knew we needed a way to have him not roam free. Originally we bought 50-foot wire leads thinking that would give them plenty of room to roam around. It sounded like a good idea until we actually used them. With 50 feet of wire, they were constantly getting hooked on rocks and roots or tangled around things. They’re not bad to have, especially if you have a big open campsite, but we eventually switched to 15-foot cloth leads and have liked them so much better. They’re long enough to hook to a picnic table and let the dogs sniff around, lie in the grass, and have some freedom, but short and flexible enough that they don't constantly get themselves tangled up.

Dog food has been another surprisingly complicated part of traveling full-time. We go through a lot of it since our dogs are 60 and 50 pounds, and Porter is picky enough that he only likes one particular brand. Unfortunately, that brand is only sold at one store, and that store doesn't have locations everywhere we travel. We’ve occasionally shipped bags to ourselves at a local UPS Store, but more often we just carry a lot of food with us which take up a ton of storage space. We found these Ruffwear food storage bags that have helped a lot. They keep the food fresh and are much easier to pack into our storage spaces than the original bulky bags.

The bigger challenge, though, has been keeping the EarthRoamer clean. Since our dogs live in the rig full-time, we wanted them to have really comfortable beds. They aren't just sleeping in them for a few nights while we're camping. These are their beds every single day. The problem is that comfortable dog beds aren't usually designed to be waterproof, and our dogs are constantly bringing in dust, dirt, and mud. We knew that washing their actual beds every week wasn't going to be realistic, so we started putting crib sheets over them. Best idea ever. Because they’re fitted sheets, they just pop right over the dog beds and stay in place. When they get dirty, we can peel them off and throw them in the washing machine when we’re at a laundromat. If we’re somewhere remote, we can also spot clean them or wash them in a bucket.

We’ve done something similar with the floor. We have a washable runner in the hallway, and a 10-foot runner fits almost perfectly in the EarthRoamer. We found a really thin one so it’s easy to roll up and wash when we’re at a laundromat. It catches a lot of the dirt and dog hair that would otherwise end up ground into the floor, and it actually makes the EarthRoamer feel warmer under our feet too. We also have a waterproof, washable rug at the bottom of the stairs, which gives us another layer of defense before all that mud and dirt makes it farther into the rig.

Temperature is another thing that becomes a much bigger consideration when you're traveling with dogs. In the summer, if we want to go do something and it's really hot outside, we have to leave the air conditioning running for the dogs. With the age of our truck and our old AGM batteries, we don't get a ton of hours of air conditioning, so that's something we take pretty seriously. Our biggest concern is running out of power and the possibility of the A/C shutting down and us not knowing about it. We tried the Waggle temperature monitor, but we didn't find it accurate enough for what we wanted, and we also didn't like that we couldn't check the app when we were somewhere without cell service. Because of that, we’re pretty conservative about leaving the dogs in the EarthRoamer when it’s hot. Our general rule is that we need to stay within about 10 minutes of them. If we’re riding bikes, that means we need to be close enough to get back in about 10 minutes. If we’re walking, we need to be within a 10-minute walk. That limits what we can do on really hot days, but it gives us peace of mind that we can get back to them quickly to check on them. We've heard about another temperature monitor that we're planning to try next summer, so hopefully we'll have a better solution for this eventually.

Winter is much easier. There’s no concern about the dogs overheating, and if it’s cold, we can leave the heater running to keep them warm. We find that much more reliable than running the A/C in the summer. We also use the Strawfoot Handmade cab window shades and windshield cover, which help keep the cab area, where the dogs sleep, cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. P.S. If you want to puchase some Strawfoot covers, use the wide wideopenroams for 5% off!

Their sleeping setup is actually one of the things we really like about our EarthRoamer. The dogs sleep in the cab, where we deleted the two back seats and had EarthRoamer install a custom dog platform. It’s essentially two storage boxes that raise the back-seat area up to the same height as the passthrough, creating one big, flat space for their beds.The boxes also give us some extra storage underneath, which is really handy because we need all the storage we can get. EarthRoamer made the platforms with the same soft material that's used on the flooring and other parts of the cab which looks nice, but it catches an unbelievable amount of dog hair and is really difficult to clean. If we were doing it again, we'd ask them to use a rubber surface instead, similar to the rubber EarthRoamer uses in the garages on newer models. It would be much easier to wipe down and wouldn't hold onto all the hair.

Nia in particular absolutely loves EarthRoamer life. Whenever we're back home and she sees the EarthRoamer nearby, she'll run straight to the back seat and look at us like, "Let's go!" Somehow, without us ever training her to do it, she also knows exactly what we mean when we say “House!” No matter where we are, she'll run back and jump inside the rig. At this point, I think she has made it pretty clear that, to her, the EarthRoamer is home.