Westside Regional Park Camping With Dogs: What We Wish We’d Known

We booked three nights of Westside Regional Park camping in Bodega Bay without reading the fine print, and the fine print turned out to be the whole trip. We had three dogs in the back of the car, a fourteen year old and two three year olds, and we had just driven up the coast from another beach campground. I thought I knew what we were walking into.

The harbor views are as good as people say. The sites are closer together than the photos suggest, there is almost no shade, and it was June and we were cold the entire time. And the thing that shaped everything else, the thing I skimmed right past when I hit the reserve button, is that these sites have no hookups at all.

So this is the guide I wish I had. Real numbers off our actual receipt, the rules that matter when you show up with dogs, and the two places within half a mile that we ended up going back to.

Quick Camp Summary

Detail	What to know
Address	2400 Westshore Road, Bodega Bay, CA 94923 (Google Maps)
Sites	46 tent and RV sites right on Bodega Harbor
Hookups	None. No electric, no water, no sewer at the site
Nightly fee	$41 ($2 off for Sonoma County residents)
Reservation fee	$10, non-refundable
Extra vehicle	$10 per night
Dogs	$2 per dog, per night. Proof of rabies vaccination required
Leash rule	6 feet maximum, and dogs must be in a tent or vehicle from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Check in / out	2 p.m. / 12 p.m. Max 8 people per site, up to 10 nights in a row
Quiet hours	10 p.m. to 7 a.m. Generators 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Showers	Coin operated, at both ends of the campground
Other fees	Dump station $10, day use parking $8, boat launch $4
Reservations	SoCoParks.org/Camping, six months out, or (707) 565-2267
What we paid	Site 6, three nights, June 7 to 10. $123 plus 12% tax, $147.76 total
Closest food	Spud Point Crab Co, 1910 Westshore Rd, 0.4 miles away
To the Golden Gate Bridge	About 55 miles

Why we drove north to Bodega Bay with three dogs

We had just finished a few nights at a beach campground further south and we were not ready to go home. Our list of requirements is short and it never changes. It has to be on the water, and it has to take all three dogs without making us feel like we are sneaking something past the front desk. If you want more places that pass that test further south, our beach camping with dogs in Southern California guide has two of them.

Westside checked both boxes, so my husband booked it. Site 6, three nights, and we drove north.

Coming from a hot, dry climate makes the Sonoma coast feel like a different planet. We left a place where you plan your day around the heat and arrived somewhere the fog sits on the water until noon. I packed for the first one. That was my mistake, and I will get to it.

Westside Regional Park camping: what a site actually costs

I am going to give you our receipt instead of a range, because ranges are useless when you are trying to decide.

A standard site is $41 a night. Sonoma County residents get $2 off. On top of that there is a $10 reservation fee that does not come back to you if you cancel. An extra vehicle is $10 a night, which matters if you are meeting friends.

We stayed three nights. That is $123, plus 12% tax, for a total of $147.76.

What that does not include: showers are coin operated, the dump station is $10, and day use parking is $8 if you are just stopping by for the afternoon. There is no camp store and no firewood for sale, so whatever you need, you bring it or you drive for it. It’s worth checking shower hours too. On a later trip the campground showers had already closed for the night, and we ended up trying truck stop showers instead.

Reservations open six months ahead at SoCoParks.org/Camping. Summer weekends go fast. Midweek in June was easy.

The dog rules that actually matter

There are three, and only one of them is the kind people actually forget.

Dogs are $2 per dog, per night. With three, that is $18 across a three night stay. Small money, but it is real money, and it is easy to miss when you are budgeting.

The park asks for proof of rabies vaccination. A vaccination certificate or a current dog license both work. Take a photo of the paperwork and keep it in your phone. It weighs nothing.

Leashes max out at six feet, and from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. your dogs have to be in a tent or a vehicle. This is the one people get caught by. You cannot leave a dog tied outside overnight, even a quiet one, even in a crate. For us it made no difference because all three sleep in the tent anyway, but if your plan was a screen room and a tie-out, plan differently.

Dogs are welcome all over the park grounds, not just at your site, which is more than a lot of campgrounds offer.

What the campsites are really like, and why no hookups matters

The front two rows look out over the harbor. Those are the ones that go first, and they deserve it. Behind them the sites flatten out into a gravel and grass loop with a fire ring and a picnic table each, and a water spigot every few sites.

Here is the part I skimmed. No electric hookups. None of the 46 sites. There is a dump station and there is potable water, but the pedestal you are picturing does not exist here.

If you are in an RV with house batteries you already know how to handle that. We were in a tent in June on the coast, which is how we ended up in a Home Depot buying a power station we had not planned on owning. That turned into its own whole thing, and I wrote it all up in tent camping with dogs when the site has no power, because it deserved more room than a paragraph.

The short version for booking purposes: if the forecast is cold and you want to run anything at all, book a site with hookups somewhere else, or budget for a battery. A couple of months later we did exactly that and booked a full hookup site, and I wrote up what it was like in my Steckel Park camping guide.

The other thing about the layout is that it is open. There is a cypress windbreak along one edge and that is most of the shade there is. Your neighbors can see you, you can see them, and when the wind comes off the water it comes straight through.

It was June and we were cold

I want to be specific about this because bring a jacket is not useful.

The fog on this stretch of the Sonoma coast sits in through the morning and often does not lift at all. The wind off the harbor runs all day and picks up in the afternoon. We were in fleece at noon. At night it was cold enough that a sleeping bag alone was not going to do it, and cold enough that the dogs pressed themselves into us instead of sprawling out the way they do at home.

If you are coming from anywhere inland or anywhere warm, mentally subtract about twenty degrees from whatever you were picturing for June. Pack the thing you think is too much. Beanies. A second blanket. Something warm to sleep in that is not the shirt you wore all day.

We learned the same lesson the hard way at Jalama Beach and apparently we needed to learn it twice.

Where to eat without leaving the harbor

This is the part I would tell a friend first.

Spud Point Crab Co is 0.4 miles down Westshore Road from the campground gate, at 1910 Westshore Rd. It is a walk-up window with picnic tables outside and a line most of the day, and the line is correct. Clam chowder is $9.95 and they do both New England and Manhattan, and the crab sandwich is the thing. They are open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. Because the seating is all outdoors, we had the dogs with us the whole time, which almost never works out that cleanly.

Captain Davey’s Ice Cream & Espresso is at 537 South Highway 1, open 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. One man runs it, and he has been at it since 2008. The espresso shake is the reason to go. I say that having gone twice and gotten it zero times, because both mornings we pulled in and the shop was closed. That is a very small coastal town for you, and honestly it made me like the place more.

There is no grocery store worth the name in town, so do your real shopping before you get here.

Using it as a base camp for San Francisco

This is the thing that makes Westside different from most coastal campgrounds, and almost nobody mentions it.

You are about 55 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. That is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes in normal traffic. We drove into the city twice from this campsite, once for dinner on our very first night and once for a full afternoon with all three dogs, and both times we were back at the tent the same day.

So you can wake up to fog on a harbor, walk your dogs past fishing boats, and eat dinner in the city that night. For anyone who wants both halves of a Northern California trip without changing hotels, that is a real argument for booking here.

I wrote up how that day actually went, leash by leash, in our dog friendly San Francisco day trip post.

Worth knowing before you go: the Golden Gate Bridge toll is southbound only, into the city, and there are no cash booths. As of 2026 it is $10.25 with FasTrak and $10.50 with a license plate account or a one-time payment. You can set up the one-time payment online after you cross.

What I would pack differently next time

Warm layers, doubled. Everything I said above. The fog does not burn off on a schedule.

A wind plan for the tent. Stake everything, and point the smallest end of the tent into the wind off the harbor. We have made enough tent mistakes to have opinions about this now.

Power, or the honest acceptance that you will not have any. Pick one before you leave the driveway. Deciding in a parking lot is expensive. We had already learned a smaller version of this lesson with power banks and an electric blanket on our first car camping trip with three dogs, and somehow we still needed this one.

The dogs’ rabies paperwork, photographed. Ten seconds at home, no stress at check-in.

Food for the whole stay. The nearest real store is a drive, and half the fun here is that there is nothing to do but cook over the fire and look at the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

One thing I would underline if you only take away two facts: the sites have no hookups, and the June weather is colder than you think. Those two together are what turned our trip sideways, and both of them are completely manageable if you know them before you pack. Book the site, bring the extra blanket, and put Spud Point on your list for the first afternoon.

I also wrote about what happened after we realized there was no power in my tent camping with dogs post, which involved a Home Depot run, a heated blanket, and a hair dryer that ate an entire battery. If you have camped at Westside or anywhere else on the Sonoma coast, I would love to hear which site number you got. Leave me a comment and tell me if the fog lifted for you, because it never did for us.

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Thinking about a coastal trip with your dogs? Save this pin to your road trip board so the campsite details and our favorite chowder stop are easy to find.