“Measure twice, cut once.” - unknown

After visiting my family in Illinois for a few weeks, the dogs and I headed back to Washington. However, before we were able to do any more riding, winter dropped enough snow across the Cascades to make it too risky to try driving over the mountains in a little car, pulling a trailer, without four wheel drive, so we had to face the facts that our riding season on the Great American Trail had come to an end. The downtime was actually a good thing because it gave me the time I needed to finally, officially, make Pedals4Paws a reality.

Ever since our ride through Seattle several months earlier, I had been thinking about how to combine my passions for animals and travel into something useful and ultimately decided on creating a travel blog to raise money for animals in need. I had been toying with several names and finally decided on Pedal4Paws . I verified that the website pedal4paws was available, which it was. I didn’t purchase the website though as it was a little pricier than I had thought and so I wanted to first create a logo that we could use on the website to make sure the name was a good fit to a logo. After a few days of various designs, I finally chose one and decided to have it printed onto a couple of pennants that I could have sewn onto the dog trailer to make things more official.

Between the time of deciding on Pedal4Paws, creating the logo, and getting the pennants printed, several weeks had passed. When the pennants finally arrived, I was ecstatic! It looked exactly like I had wanted and I knew it was meant to be, Pedal4Paws was going to be my baby! I then jumped online and went to register our website, pedal4paws.com But when I tried, I got an error message stating, “Domain taken” followed by an offer to hire a professional broker to try and negotiate the sale of the website.

How could this be happening?!?! I’d spent months mulling over a name, making a logo, and even bought the pennants for it; who could have suddenly come up with the idea to create their own Pedal4Paws?!?! Frantically, I went to pedal4paws.com to see just exactly who had usurped my dream. When I opened the website, I started to cry. I wasn’t sad, I was laughing hysterically. My dream that I had been working on for over a year had been usurped by none other than Asian porn!

Apparently, some sort of bot had seen that I had searched the website pedal4paws several times and decided that it was worth buying the site in hopes that they could ransom it to me at a much higher price. In the meantime, they wanted to make money off the site so they started selling porn on it. How could I be mad? This situation was ludicrous! Rather than negotiate with them, I tried to devise a way to sell them the two Pedal4Paws pennants that I had made since they obviously wouldn’t do me any good now….

With my dreams crushed, I had to figure out what to do next. Thankfully, the answer was pretty simple, I’d just add an “s” to the name. I immediately verified that Pedals4Paws.com was an available website, which it was, and this time, I didn’t hesitate to purchase it.

Pedals4Paws was officially born!