Your travel plans appear sorted, and I expect the weather will hold out well, with winter round the corner and the NE monsoon not quite there yet. Parts of the notoriously bad NH33, particularly on the Ranchi-Jamshedpur- Baharagora stretch, which hadn’t seen improvement for years, were being repaired in June 2015 alongside four-lane expansion, which means you can actually hope to arrive in one piece if that’s the route you are taking.

You have about 350km to cover on your first day, tiring enough for adults and extremely trying for kids, some of it through stretches that aren’t necessarily the safest. So just keep driving. Balasore to Chandipur is only about 15km on a good-enough (rurally scenic too) road, but it can get jammed and take up to an hour to negotiate. Give yourself a day to recover. Chandipur is a quaint one-street town, its sea receding 5-6km on low tide in a twice-daily phenomenon, which is a sight to behold.

It’s hard to predict road conditions after the monsoon in India, but the 225km from Chandipur to Bhubaneswar via Cuttack on NH5, and thence the 62km on the Jagannath Sadak to Puri, usually make for happy driving. You should be ensconced in your room by late afternoon. Depending on your energy levels, explore Puri-Konark-Bhubaneswar-Chilika in a couple of days and head back the same way, since you have accommodation in Chandipur.