Pet-friendly travel is not just for dogs. This is how you road-trip with a cat

Pussu meows at his mummy as it takes two humans to carry him in his huge cage from the car to the hotel room. People look and smile - it's a cat!

We are on the way from Sydney to Melbourne to visit my family and it must be a strange sight to see the carrier - aka the Pet Limousine, a hulking black vessel with mesh walls - emerging from the back of my car with yowling cat sounds emanating from inside.

As far as I can tell, we are the only ones at the caravan park with a feline, but there are many families there with their dog, and there must be thousands of Aussies taking their pooches on road trips for the Easter and Anzac Day holiday break.

I've been driving the Hume Highway with my cat for six years. Pussu is an avid traveller - you could say he was born to be on the road. But this didn't happen overnight - it came with a lot of trial and error and hours of hitting the tarmac with (and brandishing treats for) my fur-child.

First, you need to get the right mode of transport. For Pussu, it's only the best, so the Pet Limousine, something I picked up on eBay and had sent over from the US, is perfection. It's a soft shell "crate" with zip-together sides, meaning you can zip two of these babies together (or even three, if your car's that big) to make an even bigger crate with multiple "rooms".

Pussu's travelling home stretches right across the back seat of my car and anchors onto the seatbelts so it doesn't slip about. This also means you can't have any kids or an overly large supply of luggage because this thing takes up the entire back seat. So there are drawbacks. But I'm a cat mum and a cat mum only, so it works for me and Pussu.

Another thing you need to think about is that you can't take cats to the toilet in the park - not like a dog. So you need their toilet - the litter tray - in the crate with them. Pussu's goes up one end in the far "room", his food and water go in the middle and his bed goes up the other end.

He drinks from a specially-made travel bowl, also purchased online, with a floating mechanism inside that means he can stick his head in to drink the water but liquid doesn't slop over the sides. Which is excellent - and necessary - when you're going up hills or on bumpy terrain, the latter of which is pretty much the entire Melbourne end of the Hume.

Unless you have someone with you to share the driving, you might want to stick to around five hours max per day because it's a bit much for a cat to be in a dome in the car without getting out.

You'll need to stay overnight halfway, and I suggest a pet-friendly caravan park, in one of their cabins, because there's enough room for Pussu to run around and stretch his legs, but it's also affordable, which is a must with the cost of petrol and generally living these days.

Ahhhh the Hume. It's packed at Easter and Christmas, every rest stop has lines to go to the toilet, and it takes ages to get petrol, but these fond road trip memories with my Pussu will last forever. Just me, Pussu, my partner, half of Australia, the open road, and the wind in our hair (or fur - but not too much, because Pussu doesn't like that).