Our Dogs Finally Sleep in Hotels: The Chuckit! Travel Pillow Story

Dot is the reason we bought two dog beds for a car. She is a border collie mix, five years old and 38 pounds, and she paces in any room that does not smell like home. Motel rooms are the worst of it. On our short trips before 2024 she would walk the edge of a rented room for an hour while Biscuit and Murphy gave up and went to sleep.

I ran a hardware store in Decorah, Iowa for 29 years and sold it in the spring of 2023. Twenty-nine years of reading packaging, warranties and return policies teaches you something: most gear is fine until the second use. So when we started taking the dogs on longer drives, I was not shopping for the best bed ever made. I wanted something that folds small, wipes clean, and will not make me angry if a dog ruins it.

We bought two Chuckit! Travel Pillow Dog Beds in August 2024, right before the first Door County trip. They measure 30 by 39 inches. Murphy, our Lab mix, gets one to himself. Dot and Biscuit share the other, which sounds unfair and is not, because Biscuit is 30 pounds of beagle mix and takes up about the room of a folded beach towel.

The beds roll into their stuff sacks and ride in the cargo area of our 2019 Highlander. Two sacks take less room than the cooler. At a motel they come out first. Before the cooler, before the suitcase, before anyone argues about which side of the bed they want.

Beds down in the same corner of the room, then everything else. That order is the whole trick. Dot does not need a pep talk. She needs the room to have one thing in it that already smells like her. Two or three nights into Door County that first September, she stopped pacing. By the second trip she lay down on the first night, and I stopped grumbling about money spent on a pad.

The drive out is a day of stops, roughly every two hours, and the beds stay in the sacks until we stop for the night. On the road the dogs wear their harnesses and the hammock is hung across the second row. The beds are for arrival, not for the drive.

Beds down in the same corner before the suitcase comes in. By the second trip, Dot lay down on the first night.

What the bed actually is: a quilted pad, water resistant, listed at 3 inches thick and 1.63 pounds, with a one year limited warranty on materials and workmanship and a 100 pound weight limit. That is a thin bed. If your dog likes to sink into something at home, this is not that, and the listing does not pretend otherwise. Murphy is 46 pounds and has never come near the limit. Biscuit is the one who tries to claim both beds, which is her way.

At Backbone State Park in June we put the beds on the tent floor, and the water resistant face earned its keep the night the ground did what ground does. In a motel, Murphy's mud and shedding wipe off with a wet cloth and the beds go back in the sacks. At home the dogs sleep on their regular beds. These live in the car.

There is a rhythm to getting three dogs into a motel room, and the beds are part of it now. They wear their harnesses in the car, so they come out on leashes one at a time, Murphy first because he is the one who will find the mud. The beds are already down and the room already smells familiar before the last dog walks in. By then Dot has usually picked her spot.

The complaints are real ones. The beds are thin, and rolling them back into the stuff sacks takes wrestling. I have done it on a motel sidewalk in a wind with three dogs watching, and I have said things I will not repeat here. If you want a bed that stays made, this is not it.

What I would not do is tell you the Chuckit! bed fixed Dot by itself. What fixed Dot was the same corner, the same order, the same two other dogs nearby. The bed is a tool for that. If you skip the routine and hand a nervous dog a new pad in a new room, you have bought a pad.

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

Buy two if you have three dogs, and buy them before the trip, not during it. Unpack them at home and let them sit on the floor for a week so they pick up the smell of your house. Check the return policy before you leave, the way you would for anything you cannot see before you buy it, and keep the sacks somewhere you can reach without unpacking the whole car.

And put the beds down first. Before the cooler, before the suitcase, before you start deciding where things go. Gene parks the car and I get the beds out, and in our room that is the difference between a night of pacing and a night of sleep. It took me until my sixties to learn that the dog was never the problem. The order of operations was.