5 Places You and Your Pet Can Travel and Have Fun This Spring

Springtime brings its own excitement for everyone, even pets!  Perhaps you and your golden lab like the blooming flowers and verdant foliage, and love playing in the outdoors.  Maybe you and your small companion prefer to let the spring air in while doing indoor activities.  Perhaps you seek a specific environment to enjoy this season of refreshment and renewal.  Traveling with pets has become more and more common, and hotels, restaurants, and other public places are responding very strongly.  These five locales highlight a different type of vacation, sure to inspire a perfect vacation for you and your four-legged friend!

Rocky Mountain High

The Rocky Mountains offer a lot of great vacation resorts that are pet friendly, sporting guest packages that include the puppers in the welcome package!  Prime vacation spots like Aspen have hotels like the Little Nell, which offers pet beds, a pet menu, and gorgeous trails to explore with your dog.  Lesser-known locations like Telluride, CO also have pet-friendly resorts; Telluride claims to have a human-to-doggie ratio of two-to-one!  This beautiful area isn’t just for winter anymore!

Island Adventure

For the seafaring pet and owner, San Juan Island is canine accessible fun for the whole family!  This island northwest of Seattle has off-leash spots on beaches and in parks.  Hop a ferry to nearby Vancouver Island, Canada or take advantage of local trails or shopping.  This place is so pet friendly that bowls of water line the street for thirsty canines!

Get Some Extra Sun

Like warmer climes?  Naples, Florida might be the place for you!  Really, all of Southwest Florida is great for dogs, from the Everglades tours on the east side to the Gulf coast and gorgeous islands like Marco, Sanibel, and Captiva, but Naples in particular merges quiet turquoise seas with chic shops and a tropical atmosphere that has a little something for every warm-weather lover and their canine companion.  If exploring is more your style, there are tons of dog-friendly parks in this unique ecosystem featuring camping and a glimpse of Florida’s diverse wildlife.  Hop on a boat to Key West for another fun, pet-friendly adventure, too! 

Running the Country Fields

Long a practice in Europe, farmstay is fairly new to the U.S.  Farmers open their working farms and ranches to guests, who come and take in the rural setting.  While guests are more than welcome to pitch in on the farm, farmstays are more about getting closer to nature, especially for people who live in the urban grind.  Many farmstay locations are pet-friendly, so your dog can come with you, run in open fields, roll around in grass and hay, and have a grand doggie time.  While this is a fairly new trend in tourism in the United States, there are farms all over the country open to receiving guests and their pets from Oregon to Florida, and Alaska and Hawaii, guaranteeing that you can find a destination you and your pet will love!

Shopping for the Metro Puppy

The more metropolitan dog and their human need not fear being left out during spring vacation.  Major cities like Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Chicago have great pet-friendly resorts and and spots (like Central Park in Manhattan) that you can take your pet to play.  However, smaller cities, such as Seattle, Portland, and Miami, also have a lot to offer for you and your pet.  Portland has hotels specifically for pets, and, with a variety of parks and dog walks, most areas in the city are pet friendly.  Grove Island, a resort in the Coconut Grove area of Miami, pampers your pet like a VIP, with gourmet meals, a poolside welcome, and even yoga classes you can take together.

So this spring, enjoy the flowers with your pet!  No matter what the breed, your pet is welcome at so many places around the country, and around the world, that your vacation can be their vacation, too!