A four-legged hitchhiker? this is from the Tennessean

10-pound dog hitches ride to Birmingham
By CHARLES BOOTH
Staff Writer

FRANKLIN - The traffic was slow on Interstate 65 the day Buffy, a 10-pound dog, walked down the middle of the road.

A van carrying the Botes family traveling from Wisconsin to Alabama saw vehicles ahead of them narrowly missing the dog near CoolSprings Galleria.

“I yelled at my husband, Brad, to get the dog,” Kaye Botes wrote in an e-mail. “Brad opened the door and he describes picking up the dog to scooping up a golf ball from the golf cart. Suddenly, this tiny little thing was in our van.”

What the Botes didn’t know was Buffy had spent the past few days outside, separated from her family in a house off Lewisburg Pike. The day after Christmas, she left through an open door and found herself lost in a big world.

With no collar, the Botes had no way of tracing her family, and they took her home with them to Birmingham.Meanwhile, the Hood family of Franklin frantically searched for their lost dog. They eventually put a notice on Petfinder.com, one of the Internet sites Katrina families used to locate their pets.

In Alabama, the Botes heard of Petfinder.com while buying a collar for their new dog. That evening, they found the Hoods’ post and Buffy and her original family were reunited.

Read more details in tomorrow’s Williamson A.M.