Traveling with human's best friend

This short post about traveling with dogs can be summed up with an old Nike® ad: "Just Do It"

The pictures below show how our canine pals can make our getaway trips even more memorable.  We are not here to give you 10 travel tips for cruising with pets -- anyone can find those with their favorite search engine.  If you need to be told that dogs need water and should never be left alone in a car then maybe you should consider owning a pet rock.

We have never taken our dogs on airplanes (and I cannot imagine doing so) so we are only talking about long car rides.  It helps if you dog can sleep in car since it makes the trip for them shorter as well:

I do not recommend "doggie-downers" under any condition and that's all I will say about that. It also helps if your dog is friendly and patient with children, even when they get buried under piles of sand:

If your animal is not patient and you believe you might need tighter control than a leash it is better to err on the safe side.  Use something like a Gentle Leader (don't call it a muzzle!).  As seen below, they will still have fun:

No healthy dog has ever thought "I want to be left at the vet" instead of going camping, picnicking, hiking, and/or swimming:

Sometimes the biggest problem when traveling is OTHER dogs.  Particularly if they are not meeting on a neutral battlefield.  In this picture going up Stone Mountain in Georgia our pooches are having a grand old time.  But when we returned to the home of one of them it was "dicey" for the visitor.  So be careful in those situations.

The most memorable travel photograph with one of our dogs was camping in the backwoods of Kentucky.  All of us, including the pet, knew to look up the hillside ... except for the one human that didn't get the memo:

Last thing to mention is, if your dog ignores voice commands, then please try to keep your pet on a leash.  Not everyone loves to see a strange animal coming at them.  So whether you are hiking the swamps of Florida

or enjoying the hills of North Carolina 

or strolling around dog-friendly Asheville

or even going hunting for shark teeth and indian arrowheads 

keep that "runaway dog" under control.  No matter how cute he or she is.

This blog post is dedicated to our most excellent dogs of the past three decades:  Rossi, Salem, and Skittles (cameos above by Mulligan, Ally and Vanna).  We may not always know what you dogs were thinking, but you always let us know that you enjoyed traveling throughout the Eastern part of the United States with us.