A month in Mexico
The tren maya route is the road trip we embarked on for a month with Chiapas being added.
In November of 2025 I was expressing to a friend how all I wanted to do with my time was travel with Cosmo. A few hours later I get a call from my dad asking me if I wanted to spend the beginning of 2026 in Mexico with him on his dime. It was a funny experience for me as the universe heard my prayer and my dad came in just a bit later answering my prayer.
I have no income or money to do this, and so this was an opportunity that felt imperative I take. Not only because I already had wanted to, but because it was an opportunity to also create some unforgettable memories with my dad.
Originally my dad had offered 3 months in Mexico but I knew that was way too long for me so I agreed to road trip with him for one month.
We discussed various locations over the Winter and settled on spending our month primarily in the Yucatan as I had never been down there and my dad hadn’t explored that area in over 10 years.
We decided to spend January 28-February 28th road tripping with Cosmo and discovered a lot of fun dog friendly restaraunts, cafes, hotels, and cities in the Yucatan.
Traveling with Cosmo has been fairly easy and has eased a lot of my own travel anxiety. There is something about having to care for him and manage him that makes me not think about my own nerves or feelings in a way I like. Because I was flying with my dad I had to travel up to Washington from LA where he lives. We flew out of Seatac airport. To be honest Seatac is one of my least favorite airports but they do have a lot of fun things to look at in their travel stores.
For a smooth and painless travel, Cosmo is given one gabapentin and half of a trazedone for our trips and he does very well sleeping on the plane when he has his medication. Cosmo seems to really get excited and enjoy the whole airport experience. He does extremely well going through TSA, waiting in lines, and he seems to enjoy all of the attention he gets from everyone in the process.
Cosmo in his Vegan leather travel bag, this is no longer made by the company I ordered it from but you can find one’s similar on Amazon.
The one thing he really does not like when we travel are hyper kids running around. He has never been overly fond of children, probably a trait he gets from me.
The trip to Cancun was painless. It gets bumpy when you are flying over the gulf but outside of that it was fairly smooth the whole way.
Once we arrived to the airport in Cancun things got a little more complicated. Unlike the ease of driving over the border with your dog, the airport customs and inspection for dogs is a lot more exstensive. They did a physical exam, for some reason threw away his toy in his carrier that I brought, and had to fill out 5 pages of paperwork plus take photos of him for their data base.
This is also imperative to do on your return to the USA. Otherwise they will not let you on your plane.
The cities we stayed in for the month we were down there were as follows and in order;
Cancun
Merida
Campeche
Palenque
San Cristobal
Palenque again
Becan
Tulum
Cancun
Out of everywhere we visited San Cristobal and Tulum were my favorites. The best food, best hotels, the most dog friendly and honestly the best people we met along the way. Third favorite for me was surprising and happend to be Campeche which was a random stop that turned out to be quite enjoyable. I also really enjoyed Valladolid which wasn’t somewhere we spent the night but went for a day trip. I would like to go back and explore there more someday.
Overall Mexico is extremely dog friendly and an easy place to travel with your dog. It is typical that most museums, grocery stores, and historical/eco sites do not allow dogs but I will share more about that in the individual posts I do as a follow up to this blog.
I will leave this here as is for now as the following blogs will be more specific to the dog friendly places we explored.
xoxo
Analisa and Cosmo
