My dog absolutely hates being outside in the yard, but she loves walks and hikes. Unfortunately the nearest place that’s safe for us to walk is a long car ride away because I live in a somewhat rural area. So she only ever gets these on weekends when I’m able to dedicate several hours to it. If I were to live in a city she’d be getting a ton more stimulation daily.

Yeah, most of the elevators I encounter are at hotels while traveling, so it’s usually the first place I have a moment to breathe after going non-stop for hours and hours. I’m not practicing karate, I’m trying not to collapse from exhaustion.

Yeah the choice of VPN doesn't really matter here. I would just configure it to not push a default route to cut down on the amount of traffic going through. You could even use something like ZeroTier if you wanted.

Yeah, that's originally why I had it set up this way because I was somewhere where I wasn't able to open any ports.

It’s a bit of a janky solution, but I’m just running an openvpn server on the lowest tier vps which my home server auto-connects to on boot. From there it’s just iptables rules to reroute the external traffic through the VPN. I’ve also used it to proxy Minecraft servers and a few other things.