This week’s Chloe’s Clicks is an assortment of miscellaneous items, so we’ll just bounce from one to the other and not hope for a theme. Let’s start in lovely Santa Cruz, CA. Last week I told you that the city’s downtown merchants were about to vote for/against lifting a long-standing dog ban, and this week the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported that the vote went in favor of lifting the ban, with caveats: There will be a six-month trial period, no more than three dogs may be allowed to gather together, and dogs must be kept on 3-5′ leashes.

Even before the ban was lifted, Santa Cruz had some great dog-friendly options — SantaCruz.com describes several, including a beloved dog-friendly breakfast place (Aldo’s) and the oddball (and dog-friendly) Surfing Museum.

On the other side of the country, SarasotaDog.com wrote enthusiastically about having a beer and beach food with your dog at O’Leary’s Tiki Bar & Grill — the place sounds like a hoot (there’s even a small beach for the dogs to enjoy), and the pictures make me smile. I just wish I’d known about it when we were in Sarasota a couple of weeks ago!

The next three links I have for you are all resources for dog-friendly hotels and other places to stay. I’m really exited about maps4pets.com, a nice-looking site with an easy-to-use map of pet friendly accommodations in the U.K. Click on the part of the U.K. you’re interested in, and then click on the particular county you care about. A color-coded menu of choices appears (“Hotels,” “Guest Houses,” “Self Catering,” etc.), and matching color-coded dots indicate where properties of that type are located. Click on a dot, and you are given its address and easy access to its website, e-mail, and Google Maps location. Love it!

Back in the U.S., a WalletPop post reported that the Pet Realty Network offers a database of pet-friendly real estate properties to search. The pickings appear to be slim right now (I couldn’t locate any pet-friendly condos in Seattle, for example), but the site has ambitious plans (its tagline is “Pet Friendly Real Estate Around the World for Pets and their People”).

One more leap around the world, and you land down under, where a new provider, KennelSearch, allows you to book pet-friendly accommodations in Australia and New Zealand online (and helps you find other pet service providers as well).

All of this is happy news for travelers with dogs, but Stuck At The Airport wrote a post this week for msnbc.com exposing the dark side of pet travel, including owners who let their dogs poop indoors (and don’t clean up), sneak their dogs into hotels that don’t allow them, and demand unreasonable amounts of pampering (including one owner who wanted her dog to have a bed of its own with linens that matched hers). People! Don’t do that! Dog travel is in a fragile place right now — service providers are just starting to be convinced that offering pet-friendly amenities makes economic sense — and we need to be careful, thoughtful travelers so that the notion can take hold.

Speaking of picking up poop, the newest hands-off device is called the Catch-It waste collector, which is essentially a small hoop on a stick. You secure a poop bag to the hoop, and when your dog goes into her crouch, you slide the hoop underneath and catch the poop as it falls. With “the flick of a finger,” says the maker, the bag seals and can be pulled off the hoop and discarded. Chloe is not a dog that would tolerate having anything tucked under her tush during a private moment, so we will be sticking with a simpler approach.