We took 3 pupperful days to drive from Delhi to Bombay this June 🙂 I’ll talk about the doggo part here, and you can direct all your driving/route questions to Koval Bhatia because I don’t drive.

Rajasthan

Ajmer: We had originally planned to drive to Ghanerao Castle in Pali , but our car tyres had other plans. We made a last minute decision to spend the night in Ajmer at The Ajmer Bungalow. The owner, Naveen, and the caretaker, Shankar, were the sweetest most gracious hosts. The property is beautiful, has an old world charm and, to our delight, is extremely dog friendly! Ginger being Ginger rolled in something awful and stank up the room. Shankar helped in cleaning her up and bathed her like a pro. I would love to visit The Ajmer Bungalow again!

Udaipur was a major disappointment! It seemed like a lot of places in Gangaur Ghat, Udaipur were dog friendly BUT the car couldn’t go through. We didn’t want to risk parking our car elsewhere and rickshaw-ing it with Ginger. Thanks to the Instagram family, we found Jhumar Restaurant, a reasonably priced, safe and dog-friendly restaurant to grab a bite.

Gujurat

Baroda: We had planned to stay the 2nd night in Baroda at this apartment but we could not drive all the way. We decided to stop in Ahmadabad for the night. We strongly recommend taking the route via Ahmadabad even if it is a bit longer. The highway is much better and there seem to be many more restaurants and hotels to pitstop at. We do not recommend the Baroda route via Godhra.

Ahmedabad: We found the Regenta Central Antarim though petfriendly filter on Booking.com. It was another great find! The hotel was your typical corporate multistory building in the city, but they were amazingly relaxed about dogs on property. Ginger was allowed everywhere except for the restaurant.

On Day 3, we reached our home in Bombay!

Doggy comfort tips

1. Make sure you dog likes being in the car! If your dog gets nauseous, consult a vet and/or behaviorist OR choose another mode of transportation (train travel with dogs here)
2. Stop every 3-4 hours not only for the dogs to stretch, but also for the humans! Remember to provide water to your dog at every pitstop! It was often too hot to walk around, even for a few minutes. I didn’t force a pee break for Ginger then.
3. Most roadside dhabas/shacks have no problem with friendly dogs! We were even allowed inside a Subway in Rajasthan.
4. The pet-friendly filters on AirBnB and Booking.com are great! Use them and call the hotel/BnB to doublecheck.
5. Keep pre-ride meals very very small. Ginger got about 1/3rd of her meal in the morning, some dahi/chapathi at a pitstop, and one full meal in the evening/night after the drive for the day was done.
6. I was very very particular that Ginger pooped every morning. Of course, I didn’t have control over, but I felt much better knowing that her regular morning poop still happened as normal (tmi?).