So far the day kennel sounds like the best plan. I never thought of a day care type arrangement and is something we will look into.
We've always had dogs and went two years between our last one and this one because we worried about these exact situations and didn't think it was fair to a dog to board them for the duration of our trips because we want to go hiking for a day but our nephew had gotten this little guy and then was terribly allergic to him and we just fell in love with him so now we're trying to make our lifestyle match his :)