What to do when on vacation and cleaning floors

First and more important question is how to feed my cat when I'm out of town for a couple of days or a weekend. Separately how about if gone for a week? With hard food I'd just fill up the bowl but now I'm unsure. She eats commercial raw felines pride brand food, plus a chicken wing from a local farm once in a while.

I'm thinking about asking people to stop by or even hire dog walker type person to come and feed her.

Also when she eats the rain chicken wings they get dragged on the floor. How do you all deal with this? Do you just clean with some sort of safe cleaner?

Here she is eating

After putting a fair amount of thought into this, I will probably pay a cat sitter to come by twice a day for 30 minutes each time to play with and feed the cat.  There are some good local services around here.  It is not cheap but if a relative cannot do it I would feel most comfortable for kitty to be in the hands of the pros and in the comfort of her own home!

starbuk said:

 
After putting a fair amount of thought into this, I will probably pay a cat sitter to come by twice a day for 30 minutes each time to play with and feed the cat.  There are some good local services around here.  It is not cheap but if a relative cannot do it I would feel most comfortable for kitty to be in the hands of the pros and in the comfort of her own home!

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I think that is a great idea if you can swing it!  I never thought twice about leaving cats for days with dry food down, until I came home and found that they'd knocked over their water.  Ever since, even when I free-fed dry kibble, Someone has to check in on the cat(s) at least once a day or I don't leave town.

Oh, and for a cleaner I use plain rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and a paper towel to deal with the food that gets drug onto the tile.

Our neighbor's teenage son comes over twice a day whenever I am gone, so my solution is very close to the one you have.

I have a large placemat underneath the food and water dishes. I serve things like chicken wings on a large plate. Most of the time kitty drags the wing over to the nicest carpet in our house and eats it there

I clean the floor with Seventh Generation disinfectant. It does not require a potable water rinse on food surfaces, so I assume it is safe. You can also use separate spray bottles of white vinegar and peroxide. They disinfect when combined, but need to be separate until you spray on the surface to be disinfected. That is the better but less convenient solution.

In the days when I went away and nobody was at home, I thought of putting them in a ..... forgotten the word....where people put their cats when they go on holiday. When my cleaner heard this she said are you mad. So much money. I'll come in and clean their boxes , feed and water then every day.
i notice none of you are worried about clean boxes!

Honestly I couldn't imagine leaving my cat more than 18 hours without human interaction. Whenever I travel (and I travel a lot), I have someone come LIVE in my apartment so there is always someone there for cat, even just to prevent boredom. I feed ground homemade raw so I just teach the person staying at my house how to do it. 

We also hire a pet sitter when out of town. I've tried the friend route, which worked okay, but it is nicer to have someone very comfortable being around different animals. Plus I don't feel bad asking them to wash the bowls, clean the litter box, water the plants and collect the mail! The kitties get to play twice per day (we do two visits per day since they are fed AM and PM) and our preferred sitter actually enjoys staying longer with them then the usual 30min which is great! Neither of the two gals we have used had fed raw, but they were total pros with getting the cats fed. I think it helped to portion out the meals into ramekins so they could just pull them out for each feeding.

I take the cats to my mother's house for frequent visits and have done so since they were 3 months old.  My mother loves them and is more than happy to petsit when I am away.  In fact, I think they prefer it there...nice big house with lots of beds to hide under and a windows to perch on to keep an eye on the nest of rabbits that live next door, whereas in my apartment they only get to see city streets. 

The only problem is that my mother is always giving the cats treats, so they've gotten a bit spoiled in that department.  They also aren't thrilled about the car ride and I think the change does stress them a bit, but probably less than if they were left mostly alone for days.  They're the type of cats who greet me at the door and are always within a couple feet of me when I'm home.