Volunteer At Best Friends Plus Best Road Trips

West-Centric travel has this new blog post by a guy who spent a day volunteering at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, located near Kanab and Zion National Park.

Best Friends is the largest no-kill sanctuary in the US and it depends on volunteers to help care for the animals. Volunteers can do a variety of jobs including walking and grooming and cleaning up. Some animals are even available for sleep overs.

Not just dogs and cats but birds, bunnies, larger animals, reptiles...

Here's a quote from the blog:

After a brief orientation for Dogtown, it was off to the Puppy Preschool area. I chose to work with the puppies (who wouldn’t??) but you can also spend time with senior dogs, which I plan to do next time I visit.

Volunteers do a variety of tasks, and the day I was there I took puppies for walks and played with them in the fenced-in exercise area. Yeah, it’s hard work but somebody’s gotta do it. The pups have temporary names based on random things. I played with some of the “cheese” malamute mixes, Havarti and Mozzarella…:

On a related note: Emmylou Harris Honored by Best Friends Animal Society for Her Longstanding Work on Behalf of Homeless Animals

Best Friends has many friends in high places, including numerous actors and preformers.

Lonely Planet's Best Road Trips

To promote release of the second edition of it's book, USA's Best Trips, lonely planet has named five trips in this teaser article. Here are names of the five trips highlighted:

Coastal New England

Michigan’s Gold Coast

Four Corners

Ivy League Tour

Mighty Mo

Comments on the article are also worth reading. Many commentators share my view that Four Corners is worth seeing - once - but that the area around Four Corners is amazing and warrants repeated trips.