Some road trips you never forget. For us, one of them runs the length of America's most famous highway - and this year, we're packing the car again.

We're thrilled to share that Squeak N Snap is part of Fido Friendly's Get Your Licks on Route 66 Pet Adoption Tour. If that name rings a bell for our longtime friends, there's a good reason: we rolled with this tour once before, back in 2016, in a very different chapter of our story. Coming back feels a little like a homecoming - so let us tell you what the tour is, why we're in the car, and how a small camera accessory ended up tangled in such a big-hearted mission.

A quick history of Route 66

Route 66 was commissioned in 1926 as one of the first highways in America's new numbered system, running roughly 2,400 miles from Chicago all the way to the Pacific at Santa Monica. Over the decades it picked up nicknames that stuck - "America's Main Street" and, thanks to John Steinbeck, "the Mother Road." It carried families west during the Dust Bowl, fueled the golden age of the great American road trip, and gave us the diners, motor courts, and neon signs that still light up the route today. Though it was officially decommissioned in 1985, Route 66 never really disappeared. It lives on as a symbol of the open road and the simple idea that the best journeys are the ones you share.

Which, when you think about it, makes a pretty perfect backdrop for helping dogs find their people.

Saving lives, one shelter at a time

For more than fifteen years, Fido Friendly Magazine - published by animal advocates and road warriors Greg and Susan Sims - has driven the Get Your Licks on Route 66 Pet Adoption Tour down that same historic highway, traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago and stopping at shelters along the way. Every stop is a community adoption event, complete with the tour's famous spinning wheel: make a donation, take a spin, and win prizes from sponsors, with the proceeds going straight to the local shelter that day.

The results are hard to argue with. Over the life of the tour, those road trips have helped more than 20,000 pets find their forever homes.

Why a camera accessory belongs on an adoption tour

Here's the thing we think about constantly at Squeak N Snap: a shelter dog's photo is often the very first impression a potential adopter ever gets. Scroll through any adoption site and you'll see it - the dogs whose eyes meet the camera, ears up, clearly present, get noticed. The ones caught mid-blink, looking away, blurred against a concrete wall, get scrolled right past. Same wonderful dog. Very different outcome.

Squeak N Snap solves it the way dogs are wired to respond. The device uses the canine orienting reflex - that instant, involuntary head-turn toward a novel sound - to pull a dog's attention straight to the camera at the exact moment you need it. One squeak, ears up, eyes locked in. That's why being part of an adoption tour isn't a stretch for us. It's the whole point. Better photos help good dogs get seen, and dogs that get seen get homes. It's the same belief behind our 25,000 Dogs Home initiative, where we put our camera accessory directly into the hands of rescues working to improve their adoptable dogs' photos.

The old Squeak N Snap, and why 2016 means so much

To understand why returning to this tour matters to us, you have to know where we came from.

Squeak N Snap was invented years ago, long before the relaunch you see today. The original version was a hit - it landed on the shelves of Bed Bath & Beyond and found its way into a lot of dog lovers' hands. Back then, it plugged into your phone's headphone jack. And that, eventually, was its undoing: when smartphones quietly dropped the headphone jack, our little camera accessory lost its way to connect, and the product was discontinued.

That first tour in 2016 was part of the original product's life. We hit the road with Fido Friendly back then because we believed the same thing we believe now - that a good photo can change a dog's odds. When the headphone jack disappeared, so did that chapter.

The story didn't end there. Years later, our own kids rediscovered a stash of the old inventory, fell in love with it all over again, and gave us the nudge to bring it back - this time as a Bluetooth camera accessory, with the squeaker built right into the plush so it works with any modern phone. Same mission, new technology, and a CEO (our own Pooja Kanuga) leading the charge. So when we say returning to Get Your Licks on Route 66 feels like a homecoming, we mean it literally. We were here at the start, we went away, and now we're back - better built and just as committed.

How Squeak N Snap will play a part

We're not just along for the ride. As the tour rolls down Route 66 and sets up at shelters across the country, Squeak N Snap is here to help the people doing the hard work capture the photo that gets a dog noticed. Our goal is simple: put our camera accessory into the hands of shelters and rescues along the route so their volunteers can stop fighting the 47-Photo Problem and start getting that one great shot - the one that stops a scroll and starts an adoption.

Every dog deserves a photo that shows who they really are. We're honored to be back on the Mother Road helping make that happen.