Here are seven reasons we mark a campground or RV Park off our list as a potential camping location. These are listed in decreasing order of importance to us:
- We feel unsafe: Uncared for trailers with lots of people hanging around them, late night yelling and roaring car engines, etc. We’ll leave ASAP and not be back. BTW, in all our years of travels we’ve only experienced this once.
- Flakey electricity: We run an electric monitoring system all the time. It monitors and protects the RV from damaging voltages (high or low) plus other electrical issues. If the campground electric is flakey we might try moving to a different spot, but if the problem persists we’ll likely give up on that campground for good. I’ll add that the same kind of thinking to some extent applies to all utilities. Of course, we sometimes stay in places with limited utilities, most of the time, though we have full hookups that we expect to work as they should.
- Unlevel campsites: We have a leveling system and also carry a variety of leveling blocks with us. I’d say it is more common than not that we have to do some minor leveling. However, if we have to do some major leveling effort we will try a different site if possible. If a significant number of sites are the same we will camp elsewhere in the future.
- Too expensive: Again, location matters. Nice parks in popular areas can charge more and we will pay it. However, we have found that paying more doesn’t necessarily mean getting more. If we think a place is overpriced we shop around.
- Hard to navigate: Our rig is big enough that we sometimes have trouble driving it through a campground with narrow, twisting roads. We also need room to back in to a site without having other RVs, trees, etc. complicating the process. We’ve owned all kinds of camping gear – from tents up to our current motorhome and I know how to park a RV. At the same time, I don’t like having to fight my way into a spot. In some cases this is campsite specific, if not, I’ll mark that RV Park off my list.
- Neighbors too close: I know that urban, private RV Parks tend to pack people in as close as possible. It may be that, because of location I’ll put up with tight quarters for a week or so. However, we generally avoid “parking lot campgrounds.”
- Noisy location: For some reason RV Parks seem to end up near active railroad tracks or nestled up against busy Interstates and Freeways. Again, for shorter stays we will grin and bear it. For longer stays, no thanks.
By and large, we are happy campers who love the RV lifestyle. We don’t need to stay in high dollar resorts to be happy and we generally roll with the punches. Still, we’ve stayed in a few places that we aren’t likely to visit again.
How about you? What would you add to this list?