DECATUR, Ill. (WCIA) – Decatur native Chad McIntyre says it can get lonely on the road as a truck driver, going around the country without anyone at your side. That’s why he started bringing his family’s cat Tyler along for the rides.

“He had been a great companion for a little over a month that I had him on the truck,” McIntyre said. “He’s a very well traveled cat. He’s been in I would say 20 of the 48 lower states anyway.”

In November, the pair pulled up to a truck stop in Fernley, Nev.

“Everyday is the same routine with us,” McIntyre said. “It was I get up, get myself, my stuff together, get him fed, I would get out, open my passenger door and clean the litter box.”

That’s when the cat-tastrophe struck: Tyler escaped.

“I was scared,” McIntyre said. “I felt horrible. It was, ‘Oh my God, my cat is gone. He’s out here,’ especially in the area I was in, it’s just wide open desert, mountains and the animals that are out there are not very nice in that rural area, as far as the wildlife goes.”

McIntyre’s wife, Brandi McIntyre, posted all over Facebook about Tyler’s disappearance, and contacted Tyler’s microchip company to help find him.

Five days later, they got the call they hoped for. Tyler was safe in an animal shelter but in a place they had never heard of: Rock Springs, Wyo., about 670 miles away from the Nevada truck stop where he went missing.

Brandi McIntyre said she was in complete shock.

“When they told me where it was, I was like, ‘He’s where,’” McIntyre said. “There’s no way by foot that he got there.”

How Tyler ended up in Wyoming remains a mystery, but his family thinks another truck driver may have found him and that he was eventually dropped off at the shelter. Still, Tyler had to make a more than one thousand mile journey back to Decatur.

“I was going to drive immediately to go get him and my parents and my husband were like, ‘Nope, I-80 is horrible in the winter. You’re not going. Not doing it,’ McIntyre said. “And I said, ‘Okay, well, then we were going to fly him.’ We said, ‘Can we fly him?’ Well, they couldn’t do that.”

With the help of the animal shelter, several people stepped up to help reunite Tyler with his family.

“They call it legs, so it was like each person drove a certain amount of hours and miles, and then you just switch them off and switch them off,” Brandi McIntyre said. “And so, on New Year’s Eve, I met him in St. Louis to pick him up, and he’s been home ever since.”

And that’s where his family says he will stay. They say there aren’t plans at the moment to get him back riding in the truck anytime soon.

“He’s grounded,” Brandi McIntyre said. “He’s not going back in the truck.”