I have just a handful of dog travel links for you this week — let’s start with The 50th Plate, which was featured last week too (remember the Corgis on the beach at Carmel?). This week, I loved author Sherry’s post about the dog-friendly Carmel Valley Ranch Resort, a place I’ve been eying for a while, as well as other Carmel-area attractions that welcome dogs.

Another reprise from last week’s Chloe’s Clicks? Fido Factor, which visited most of the Russian River area dog-friendly beaches mentioned in their tweet, and posted some fine pictures of their dogs Captain and Trax playing.

I just learned this week about Kimpton Crawl, a blog written by Sara, Marty and Oscar the Golden Retriever about their cross-country trip staying in Kimpton hotels (and other hotels too). Their current post is about taking Oscar to a Northern California redwood forest (not an easy thing to do, it turns out, but they have a trick to share) — look in their sidebar under “Archive” for their past posts, which are all terrific.

Changing coasts, Greyt Black Dog wrote a fun post about taking greyhounds Seka and Roxy on a trip to (and around, by trolley) Savannah, Georgia. And the excellent Travels with Ace team (author John and pup Ace) made their way across Tennessee and into North Carolina, objecting vigorously to hotel pet fees — and regretting the absence of the “kudzu dogs” that had cheered their Summer 2010 travels around the South.

What do I think about hotel pet fees? The argument is, presumably, that the fee covers the cost of the extra time it takes to clean a room that’s been occupied by a dog. That only makes sense to me if something really remarkable happens during the cleaning process, like steam-cleaning the rug. If, however, the cleaning process involves vacuuming the rug and other soft surfaces thoroughly, scrubbing/disinfecting the hard surfaces, and changing the duvet cover and shams (as well as the sheets and pillowcases), it seems to me that those are things that should happen after every guest, not just guests with dogs. I do not believe that a fee should cover anticipated damage to a room — that concern could be handled by a refundable deposit. What do you think about hotel pet fees?