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Chloe’s Clicks: This week’s best dog travel links

This episode of Chloe’s Clicks is long overdue, but I think that just makes it tastier, like giving the lemons more time to infuse the grain alcohol. The oldest link is from Huffington Post, and points you to five dog-friendly hiking trails in and around Los Angeles. Also from Huff Post? A post about three dog-friendly hotels in Portland, OR — I’d add to the list the Heathman Hotel, our favorite, and the funky Ace Hotel.

In the Bay Area, the Mercury News reports that the park service is reviewing its current plan for regulating access for visitors with dogs to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including the Rancho Corral de Tierra, a new property between the Crystal Springs Reservoir and Moss Beach, where a ranger recently Tasered a dog owner walking his two small dogs off-leash (the area was off-leash until December 2011, when it was incorporated into the GGNRA).

Just a few days later, L.A. musician Arune Kavaliauskaite made the news when she “allegedly attempted to run over an L.A. County park employee who had repeatedly told her to leash her light-colored, mixed-breed dog at the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in Pasadena.” The take-home lesson from all this? Find out what the rules are before you go somewhere with your dog (and rules change, sometimes, from one month to the next); consider, too, that there may be good reasons behind the rules. Even if there aren’t, the place to challenge the rules is not on the trail.

Also on the Left Coast, more or less: Whistler has “gone to the dogs,” according to an msnbc.com article which mentions a couple of dog-friendly hotels (and provides a link to more) and suggests cross-country skiing with your dog at Whistler Olympic Park. Speaking of skiing, the Travels With My Dog team of Helen and Raja recommends Vail, CO, and an Animal Fair post highlights dog-friendly options in Aspen, Sun Valley and Bethel, ME.

Enough of the West Coast — let’s look at Scotland instead, by way of a scotsman.com post (via a tweet from @threestraydogs3) about how more Britons are choosing to vacation at home rather than abroad; many luxury hotels in Scotland are responding by welcoming pets and adding pet-friendly amenities. So far, so good — as one hotel owner points out, “’Most dogs are at least as clean as most humans.’” The BBC clearly thinks things have gone too far, however, at a U.S. hotel (the Loews Coronado Bay Resort, near San Diego) that offers dogs surfing lessons.

Speaking of abroad, a couple from Ormskirk, Lancashire wrote a post about the logistics of bringing Cagney and Lacey, their Yorkshire Terriers, to Spain. Most interesting to me is their observation that it was easy to find dog-friendly hotels in Paris, but hard in Spain. Reflecting on a recent trip to Kenya in a thoughtful article for The Bark, Lisa Wogan regrets treating a couple of feral dogs with the kind of affection she shows her own dog, realizing that her warmhearted gestures altered the norm in a way that might cause them harm.

My eye was caught, too, by a post from the Go Pet Friendly team profiling an individual and two families who are traveling with their dogs to gather material for a book about Americans and their dogs, “to raise awareness about pet therapy and animal rescue,” and to raise funds for financially-strapped military families. Amy Burkert, part of the same Go Pet Friendly team, also wrote a sensible and helpful post about preparing for a road trip with your pet. Less sensible? A blog post by Danielle Steele about emotional support animals. No doubt she meant well, but her post makes it sound easy to convince an airline that your pet qualifies as an ESA, and points out that emotional service animals don’t have to be contained in a carrier, and aren’t subject to the substantial pet fees airlines charge. Given Ms. Steele’s immense popularity, it seems like it would have been more responsible for her to have researched the topic (“You have to have paperwork to back it up, and I’m not sure what that is (maybe a letter from a doctor about being afraid to fly?? I didn’t ask)”). She would have learned that it isn’t easy, or shouldn’t be, to get the certificate an ESA owner must have. Hopefully, the system has enough structure in place to keep it from being misused.

The last link in the collection is to a blog I hadn’t seen before reader Amanda brought it to my attention on Dog Jaunt‘s Facebook page: Ty and Suzanne are sailing the world in Liberty, their 1980 Morgan 461 sloop, along with Rudy, their long-haired Miniature Dachshund, and Rudy the Cruising Canine is not only delightful (the photos! Lordy mercy, the photos!) but seriously useful. Do not miss the Cruising Dog FAQs page or their experiences clearing customs with Rudy.