We took Doris Daylily with us to Helen, Georgia for our very short vacation earlier this week, and I learned a lot about traveling with a dog.

1. People love dogs. I had no idea! I don't go around chasing other people on the street or in the park when they're walking their dogs, trying to pet their dogs. But when you're in a tourist town with a lot of other tourists, and you have your corgi with you, you get stopped A LOT. Everyone wants to pet the dog. Everyone wants to know what it is. If they know what a Welsh corgi is, they want to know how old Doris Daylily is, because she's so tiny. (She is tiny, even for her young age. She'll fill out a little more, but really she is small.)

It was kind of nice to meet so many people, and I'm awfully grateful that they were so nice to Doris. Wouldn't it have been a bummer if perfect strangers were kicking her and throwing rocks at us for having our dog with us on vacation?

2. Doris Daylily is a *marvelous* companion while traveling! Her needs are simple: Get out every once in a while and let her play a little, keep her hydrated, and let her sleep in the car. Wonderful! She loves every tourist attraction she sees, and she never whines that we didn't go to the waterpark or buy tickets to the theatre.

3. When you go to a strange town, there are A LOT of places that other dogs have peed at. Doris needs to smell all of them. She needs to pee on most of them. Then she needs to go back in the morning and smell them again, and pee on them again, just to make sure.

4. Take a towel with you. There's a lot of unexpected dirt out there in the world, and my dog wants to find them all. She also wants to wade in the Chattahoochee River. Wading itself isn't an issue -- it's the mud and sand on the way out of the river that really causes problems.

5. Doris Daylily is wonderful in a motel room, but she really prefers home. When we throw her squeaky ball at home, she runs across the hardwood floors and slides under the furniture on the other side of the room to catch the ball. Motel rooms have carpet, and she can't slide on it! I didn't even realize how much Doris loved sliding until we took her out of town. She has done more than the usual amount of sliding since we got home!

6. My dog loves to hike! Who knew! She practically pulled me up the mountain when we went to see Anna Ruby Falls. It's just a short half-mile hike.... at, like, an 82-degree angle. ;) Eep! Thank goodness Doris was there to help me up the cliff.

I'm going to upload a few pictures of Doris on her adventures in Georgia. I just really wanted to say -- wow! Traveling with a dog is so much easier than I would have thought. But maybe it's just because Doris is such a perfect dog!