Park Hotel Mount Gambier

The Park Hotel is a pub with rooms on Commercial Street West in the centre of Mount Gambier, the big service town of the Limestone Coast. It is a working hotel in the traditional mould: a public bar and pokie room, a bistro with a salad bar and gluten free options, a shared kitchen for guests, and quiet rooms upstairs that visitors regularly note for a good night's sleep at a fair price. Staying here puts you in the middle of town, walkable to the Cave Garden, the Blue Lake lookout drive and the main street's cafes and pubs.

The accommodation is a mix of boutique hotel rooms and cabins, which is unusual for a city pub and is what makes the dog story here different from most.

Dogs at the Park Hotel

Per the hotel's own accommodation page, four of the cabins are dog friendly, taking up to two dogs per cabin, and dog bookings share access to a private access dog yard. The scope matters: dogs must be booked into one of those designated dog friendly cabins, they are not permitted in the standard cabins, and the boutique hotel rooms are not dog friendly at all. So a dog means a cabin, and the yard gives them somewhere to stretch without a street walk at night.

Regulars time the shared yard for the early morning or evening slots, when it works as a social hour for the cabin dogs, and the cabins sit close enough together that a barky dog will make itself known to neighbours. One detail catches people out: the deck entry runs a couple of steps, so older dogs may need a lift or a ramp.

Worth knowing

With only four dog friendly cabins in the pool, book ahead and name the dogs when you do. If you were picturing an upstairs room over the pub, that option is off the table with a dog, so decide early whether the cabin trade suits the trip.

Check the bistro and beer garden rules for dogs when you arrive rather than assuming, and if the weather or the house rules shut the garden out, locals point to the cider garden at Mac's Hotel and the verandah at the South Eastern Hotel as fallbacks. The local morning ritual is a dawn lap of the Valley Lake rim before the tourists wake.

Close by with the dogs

Mount Gambier has a solid dog friendly circuit: Limestone Coast Pantry MG and Breaking Bread for coffee and breakfast, and Mount Gambier Brewery for dinner. For the wider Limestone Coast, Port MacDonnell Foreshore Tourist Park and Pine Country Caravan Park at Moorak both work with dogs. The full list is on the South Australia dog friendly stays page.