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Bernal Heights: San Francisco off-leash dog park

Chloe and friend at the Bernal Heights dog park

I had heard good things about the Bernal Heights dog park, but nothing could have prepared me for its outrageous, gorgeous views of the City by the Bay (this iPhone picture does not do it justice — from where I was standing when I took it, you can see the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, then turn around and see the rest of the city).

Bernal Hill is a former quarry, and although at this time of year it has lots of grass and wildflowers, you’re not here for the flora. You may not be here for the fauna either — it’s a popular place for dogs of all sizes, and Chloe was a bit overwhelmed at times. The views make up for any defects, however, and I have to admit that all of the dogs we saw seemed to be deliriously happy.

Poop bags are available at both of the main entrances — one at the intersection of Folsom St. and Bernal Heights Blvd., and the other at the end of Bernal Heights Blvd. The park is huge (some 39 acres) and criss-crossed with paved and unpaved paths. Be sure your dog has a good recall command, however, since there are no fences.

Bernal Heights Dog Park
Bernal Heights Boulevard
San Francisco, CA 94110

Pet relief area at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) — International Terminal or Terminal 1

On the bright side, SFO is an airport that (a) has pet relief areas, and (b) is willing to reveal their locations. They’re on the SFO airport map (look at the interactive map and click on “services” and “Animal Relief Areas”), and upon inquiry you’ll get written directions too. Unfortunately, SFO is a complicated place, so the map isn’t very helpful, and the written directions — well, good effort, but “one is located between Terminal 1 and the International Terminal (Courtyard 1)” doesn’t cut the mustard when you’re in a hurry. Here are more details.

We were traveling on Virgin America, so we landed at SFO’s International Terminal. [6/27/11 Virgin America now flies into SFO’s T2, so Virgin America passengers and dogs should look instead for the pet relief area next to T2.] Usually, pet relief areas are outside baggage claim, but not at the International Terminal. Go back up to the departures level and follow the signs saying “Walkway to Domestic Terminals.” Once you’re in the Domestic area, take the first escalator back down to the arrivals level and look for signs to the Animal Relief Area. Once you’re outside the doors, you’ll see paw prints painted on the ground, leading to the pet relief areas. We never saw a sign for Courtyard 1, so that locator won’t be a help.

If, instead, you arrive at domestic Terminals 1, walk down to the baggage claim area and turn left. Walk to the end of the terminal building and look for the “Animal Relief Area” signs. When you exit the building, look for the paw print path.

Here’s what you’ll find — a fairly large graveled area, fully fenced and equipped with poop bags, trash cans and a water source. It’s not the best I’ve seen, but it was clean and not too cramped — I’ve seen far, far worse (hello, Seattle? Denver? Las Vegas?).

SFO pet relief area (Terminal 1)

Travel tip: If you’re renting a car at SFO, I suggest skipping the airport pet relief areas and taking the airport train straight to the car rental building. You’ll arrive on Level 4; go down to Level 1 and exit the building to find a small but serviceable planting strip. It will save you a lot of time, but be sure you’re equipped with a poop bag.

This post is part of an ongoing series of reviews of airport pet relief areas we’ve visited. To see others, visit Dog Jaunt’s handy guide to airport pet relief areas.

Which seat works best with an in-cabin dog? [Virgin America A320]

We just returned from a trip to the Bay Area via Virgin America, so I had two chances to check out Virgin’s A320 under-seat measurements. Unlike JetBlue, which also flies A320 planes, Virgin America divides its A320s into two classes (First and Main). First Class has two seats on each side of the aisle, while the main cabin has three seats on each side of the aisle.

There is a bulkhead between the two classes, and you are not allowed to sit there with a dog. There is also a bulkhead in front of the first First Class row, and the same goes there.

The only First Class row that has under-seat space, in fact, is Row 2. However, although I couldn’t get close enough to get you exact measurements, I can assure you that the only dog that would fit under a First Class seat is a teacup-sized dog in a purse-style carrier lying on its side. If you have an in-cabin dog, the main cabin is the only way to go. [4/22/10 My husband just traveled First Class on a Virgin America A320, and confirms that there is no under-seat space in First Class. All your carry-on items have to go in the overhead compartment.]

Your best choice is an aisle or middle seat. All three seats carry a life vest packet enclosed in a firm plastic container, so the under-seat height is a fixed 8.5 inches. The aisle seat space is 18″ wide (that is, measured left to right), and so is the middle seat space, even though there is a box for electronics on one side. The window seat space is slightly narrower, at 17″ wide.

Although my carrier was 10.5″ tall, it flexed just enough to squeak under the seat. This is another place, however, where I would have liked to have been using our SturdiProducts carrier, which flexes more easily.

This post is part of an ongoing series recording under-seat measurements of the various planes we fly on. Keep in mind that most domestic and international airlines have rules about the maximum size of in-cabin pet carriers they allow on board (see Dog Jaunt’s handy charts under the “Taking your pet on a plane” tab above).

Chloe’s Clicks: Dog travel links we liked this week

We were traveling for the past few days, so Chloe’s Clicks is screeching in just before the new week gets underway….

The link I loved the most this week was posted by All Dog Boots and describes the author’s first-ever trip with an in-cabin dog (Cooper, an adorable Maltese/Yorkie). Cooper’s owner and I swapped a lot of tweets about trip preparations, so I was really interested to hear the details. [SPOILER: All went well!]

If you plan to travel by car instead, take a look at a post by Michele Hollow of Pet News and Views about taking a road trip with your dog. It’s a good overview of the essentials — I’d just add (as I did in a comment) that you also need to figure out a way to keep your dog safe in the car, whether it’s with a harness or a crate or a car divider. And however you travel, make sure your dog’s tags and microchip information are up to date, as Will My Dog Hate Me‘s Edie Jarolim reminds us.

Now you know how to get there, where will you go? The Phoenix New Times described some fun dog-friendly places to eat in Phoenix and Scottsdale, and guest blogger Karen Friesecke (be sure to check out her Doggie Stylish site) reported in a Take Paws post on a trip she and Jersey, her Vizsla, took with some friends to Ontario’s Wasaga Beach this past Labor Day. Or check out this fun post from Petswelcome.com about some dog-friendly museums in Great Britain.

My last link is from Gadling — it’s a Galley Gossip post about some unusual support animals the flight attendant author has encountered, and ends with a description of a passenger taking his dog to the plane’s bathroom. I’ve talked about taking your dog to the bathroom on a very long flight, but I recommend that you do it only in an emergency and that you keep your dog in her carrier until you’re inside the bathroom.

Photo Friday: Dog travel photos wanted!

Today’s picture was taken last November in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo. In this shot, dog and owner both look businesslike — but photographer Ed Yourdon says that the pair circled the piazza several times, enjoying a Sunday outing.

Photo by Ed Yourdon

Please send me links to your favorite dog travel photos! They’ll get listed below, for everyone to click on and view. Here’s how it works:

  1. Every Friday, I’ll put up a post like this one, sometime during the morning (Pacific time).
  2. If you have a blog or a website, post a dog travel photo on your site on Friday and link back here to the current week’s “Photo Friday” post so that your readers can see other great dog travel photos. Please take a moment to make sure that you are linking directly to your photo post instead of your homepage.
  3. If you don’t have a blog or a website, simply post your photo to Flickr (or Facebook, Twitpic, etc.).
  4. Enter a link to your photo or your blog post in the form at the bottom of my post. That way, Dog Jaunt will link back to you. Please include a few words in the “Link Title” box describing where you took the photo.

Poop, and picking it up

My new issue of Fido Friendly arrived last night, and while I’ve mentioned before how much I love the travel articles, the ads are almost an equal attraction. This time, the money-winner was an ad on page 25 for the Pawsby PooPatroller, a “concealed pooper scooper plus” (plus what? a flashlight, leash, and removable water bowl, it turns out). I realize that someone is pinning his hopes on the success of the PooPatroller, and is even now gazing with pride at boxes of PooPatroller units. I don’t want to rain on his parade. I’m compelled, however, to make the following points about poop:

Pick up your dog’s poop

Many people don’t pick up after their dogs, some because they just don’t want to, and some because they feel that dog poop is a natural fertilizer. It turns out, however, that dog poop is a source of disease for your dog, other animals and for humans (including roundworms, salmonella, and E. coli, among others). Because of these risks, it is a poor fertilizer. When it rains, dog waste is washed into lakes and streams, making them unsafe for swimming, and into public water supplies, increasing the cost of water treatment.

It’s not difficult

You buy a roll of poop bags, or you grab a couple of the bags your newspaper comes in. You put your hand in the bag. You pick up the poop. Because you use your hand, you don’t mangle the poop getting it into the bag, so smell is not an issue. You pull the bag off your hand, enclosing the poop. You tie the top in a single knot. You never come into direct contact with dog poop. What could be simpler? [5/14/10 If you need inspiration, here are pix of sexy, beautiful, famous people picking up dog poop, courtesy of People Pets! They’re all using the hand-in-the-bag method!]

And yet there are services that will come out and do the dirty work for you, and an endless stream of products designed to keep poop at arm’s length. If you’re looking for a home system, check out the Doggie Dooley products. If you’re walking a dog, however, you need to carry your disposal system with you. Here’s where products like Dispoz-A-Scoop and the PooPatroller come in.

Dispoz-A-Scoop disposable scoopers require the user to nudge the poop into the holder — with what? and heaven help you in long grass. Also, please note that while the bag and cardboard handle are biodegradable, the wire frame isn’t.

The PooPatroller gets around the wasteful packaging problem by using biodegradable bags, but requires you to carry around a sizable pooper scooper (dressed up as a helmeted dog in sunglasses). It comes with an attached leash, presumably to cut down on the number of things you have to handle at once, but the effect is not streamlined. I’ll just say that until I saw the PooPatroller publicity shot, I had never seen a glum Cavalier.

All of this machinery seems particularly foolish to me, given that both products are directed at owners of small dogs. A small dog’s poop pile is small, and takes only a second or two to pick up directly.

I hadn’t realized I had so many gripes about poop. I’ll stop now, with one last rant about people who tuck a full bag of poop under their dog’s collar so the dog can carry it until they get to a trashcan. Maybe dogs don’t really care about this one, despite their incredible sense of smell, but it bugs the heck out of me. Surely we can carry the bag ourselves, or leave it in a known spot to pick up on the return trip.

Book review: It’s A Dog’s World — The Savvy Guide to Four-Legged Living

Somehow I got the (mistaken) idea that this new book by pet-lifestyle expert and animal rights advocate Wendy Diamond is all about traveling with your dog, so of course I snapped it up to review for you. It turns out that only Chapter 3 deals with dog travel — but it’s a useful, inspiring chapter, and I’m not a bit unhappy.

Generally speaking, It’s a Dog’s World is an upbeat book encouraging you to get off your duff and enjoy your dog’s company. Diamond suggests fun exercise alternatives and nudges you towards feeding your dog healthy meals, furnishing your home in a way both of you will enjoy, and choosing a healthy and sensible grooming routine. She devotes one chapter to pet-themed party-planning, another to doggy fashion, and a third — bless her heart — to traveling with your dog.

Although she’s clearly working with a different budget than most of the rest of us (her recommendation for a pet-friendly hotel in Paris, for example, is the divine but unaffordable Le Meurice), she’s such a sweetheart that you don’t, in fact, want to kill her. How can you not love a girl who ‘fesses up to slamming down pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? Despite Le Meurice, she’s a sister, and the advice she offers in this book is generally sensible and down-to-earth.

The first part of her chapter on traveling with a dog provides basic advice and suggestions — nothing particularly detailed, nothing I didn’t already know, nothing that isn’t already handled on Dog Jaunt. The second half, however, is a delight. Diamond lists several towns and cities in the U.S. and abroad and sketches out just the outlines of a pet-friendly visit to each — her getaways are pricey, but truly fun. For me, pages 50 to 60 were worth the price of the book. They do what Diamond does best — remind you that your dog is a wonderful companion, and point you towards activities that will make both of you happy.

Amazon link:
It’s a Dog’s World: The Savvy Guide to Four-Legged Living

Creature Leisure’s Pet Pilot XL rolling carrier

[1/31/13 Phooey!! It looks like this product has been discontinued.]

Last August I reported that I’d bought a rolling pet carrier that looked really good — Creature Leisure’s Pet Pilot XL. For one reason and another I only tried it out a couple of trips ago. Here’s what we thought.

Things we liked: This is, indeed, a very well-made carrier. The zippers and mesh are sturdy, and the carrier rolls solidly — not a wobble to be seen. It cleverly expands with a zipped gusset, and the interior structure and padding unfold to create a supported larger space for your dog. In the picture to the right, I’ve unzipped the gusset during a layover, and Chloe’s poked her nose into the gusset corner. That huge mesh panel near my left leg is on top when the bag is under an airplane seat, so I had good access to Chloe, and she could see me easily.

Things we didn’t like: The downside of solid construction is weight, and this is a heavy carrier. Chloe and her bag were weighed for the first time on our most recent trip (we were using a different carrier), so although it’s rare, it does happen, and a 10 lb. carrier may cause you trouble. The gusset is brilliant, but once you’ve unzipped it, you have to unzip the main opening to the carrier, reach your hand in, and pull the interior structure and padding away from their normal position to support the newly-expanded space. An antsy dog will try to wiggle out of the carrier during this maneuver. The Pet Pilot XL is also, generally speaking, oversized. In use, however, it squeaks under plane seats — and it looks so trim that ticket and gate agents didn’t give it a second glance.

On balance, it’s a great carrier. I don’t anticipate using it much in the future because it’s just a bit too small for Chloe. On a trip that lasted over a couple of weeks in different locations, we gave it several test runs, and by the end she really resisted getting back in. I recommend it wholeheartedly for dogs 10 lbs. and under.

Chloe’s Clicks: Dog travel links we liked this week

This week’s dog travel links take you all around the world and into a heated debate. Let’s do the fun part first:

I discovered a new (to me) blog this week, called Maggie in Venice. It focuses on a Bearded Collie named Maggie, spending several months in Venice with her American owners. Maggie’s adorable, as you’ll see in the heaps of photos the Imbodens have posted, and Venice is, you know, Venice. You’re going to love reading about the dog-friendly side of La Serenissima.

Nearby Cyprus used to ban dogs from all of its beaches. In 2003, it passed a law requiring each of its coastal cities to designate a dog-friendly beach — but dog-owning Cypriots are having a heck of a time getting results. To date, only the resort town of Ayia Napa has acted on the law; in 2008, a dog and owner were killed in a dispute over the dog’s presence on a Paphos beach.

The globe spins and takes us to Saanich, B.C. and its off-leash dog-friendly beach at Arbutus Cove Park, described in a guest post on Take Paws by blogger Jim McBean (Take Paws and Jim’s Doggy Bytes are both terrific blogs — get yourself a cup of coffee and tuck into them). The beach sounds like dog heaven, and looks like it too — check out the picture of a dog conference between Jim’s dogs and a new friend.

Another spin of the globe and we land in Florida, where you’ll find the Castaways Beach and Bay Cottages, located on the northern tip of lovely Sanibel Island and profiled by Leila Coe, a dog-friendly travel agent and author of And A Small Dog. I’ve been to Sanibel, and loved it — it’s warm, relaxed, and the beaches are thick with shells. You’ll also find the Brazilian Court Hotel, located in Palm Beach and profiled by Janine Franceschi, proprietor of the luxury-oriented pet travel agency PAW: Pet Accommodations Worldwide.

But what if you want to send your dog off on a trip of its own? Take Paws posted an article this week describing the dog-only weekend excursions organized by New York’s Northward Hound. Northward Hound will pick up and drop off your dog, entertain her with romps and hikes, and keep her in the founders’ home. The trips cost $100 per day for either a 3-day or 4-day weekend, but given how much kenneling costs, a weekend like this doesn’t, in fact, seem overpriced. I also like it that Northward Hound limits each weekend to six dog guests.

This week’s controversial topic is in-cabin dogs: Three Canadian doctors wrote an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal arguing that dogs should not be permitted to travel in-cabin on planes (hoping, apparently, to encourage the Canadian Transportation Agency to regard people with allergies as disabled and requiring special accommodation). The New York Times raised the issue a few months ago, and here’s what I wrote then. The topic inspires a lot of heartfelt but uninformed debate. I’d like to see real data — not just individual’s reports — about allergic incidents, and hear a considered discussion by medical professionals about the viability of pre-flight medical treatment of allergy sufferers and the effectiveness of physically separating dogs and allergic flyers on planes.

And now for something completely different: A Dr. Helen post brought to my attention a Mattel product I’d completely missed, called Puppy Tweets. Clip the tag on your dog’s collar and start receiving tweets whenever she moves, naps or barks. According to the Amazon write-up, “a bark may generate a Tweet of: ‘I bark because I miss you. There I said it. Now hurry home.’ A quick run through the house could produce: ‘I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and…OOUUUCHH!’” I’m with author Helen Smith, who pretty much says “Whaaa??” If it’s just what you’ve been waiting for, though, it’ll cost $29.95 and you’ll have to wait a bit longer — it’s only being pre-released on Amazon.

Photo Friday: Dog travel photos wanted!

Today’s photo is a couple of weeks old, taken at South Beach on San Juan Island. Leashed dogs are allowed on the beach, but bring your own poop bags. Chloe loves this place, largely because there are slow-moving shore birds to chase (still, they’re faster than she is). We love it because it’s windy and exhilarating, and on a really clear day you can see all the way to Mt. Rainier.

Please send me links to your favorite dog travel photos! They’ll get listed below, for everyone to click on and view. Here’s how it works:

  1. Every Friday, I’ll put up a post like this one, sometime during the morning (Pacific time).
  2. If you have a blog or a website, post a dog travel photo on your site on Friday and link back here to the current week’s “Photo Friday” post so that your readers can see other great dog travel photos. Please take a moment to make sure that you are linking directly to your photo post instead of your homepage.
  3. If you don’t have a blog or a website, simply post your photo to Flickr (or Facebook, Twitpic, etc.).
  4. Enter a link to your photo or your blog post in the form at the bottom of my post. That way, Dog Jaunt will link back to you. Please include a few words in the “Link Title” box describing where you took the photo.