We spend a lot of time choosing the right campsite for our family and the trip we have planned. We take several things into concideration when picking campsites.
Are we camping with friends or family?
If we are camping with other families, we pick sites close together. We are usually sharing all meals, so this makes meals so much easier. Also, our kids are usually running from one site to the next, and we want to keep them close by. We're finding it's best to have campsites back to back or across the road vs. next to each other. The ones back to back and accross the road tend to be closer than the ones next to each other. Also, this makes it easier when we want to have late nights around a bon fire after we've put the kids to bed. So far, we've only had one exception to this.
It's sometimes hard to tell this by looking at maps and pictures, but we really try to reasearch it well before booking. Then we try to book at the same time, or one of us just books both sites. We've also called the park to ask which campsites are best for this.
Who else needs to go on a 2:00 a.m. bathroom run?
Being a family with young kids, we look for sites that are close to the bathrooms. This makes the bathroom runs in the middle of the night, the rain, or first thing in the morning, more managable.
Espessially with 3 kids, and the two of us parents. I can't tell you how many times we have been cooking a meal, a kid has to go to the bathroom, one of us has gone with, then another kid has to go. It's great to be able to send the second child to the bathroom knowing it's close by and the other parent can't miss them while on their way back to camp.
Now that they are getting a little older, it's nice to be able to send them to the bathroom alone, and be able to see the bathroom from our campsite. We don't have a big preference between vault toilets or restrooms. If the better campsite is closer to the vault toilet, that's fine.
Where's the trail?
Is there a trail from the campsite we plan to frequent? Do we plan on parking in our campsite and exploring most of the park by foot (this is especially true in state parks). There's a state park we frequent that has a trail from the campground to the beach, boardwalk and forest trails. There isn't a way to park closer to the trailhead or the beach. The beach and board walk to the lagoon are two of our favorate places and we spend a ton of time at both. It's so nice to have a site close to the trail, especially when we bring the canoe. There isn't a boat launch, so if we're camped further from the trailhead, it's more work to bring the canoe down to the water. Also, if we do go back and forth, the kids aren't as tired by the long walks. Another perk, if we forgot to bring something down to the beach, it could mean the difference of a 20-minute round trip walk vs. 45-minute or more round trip walk.
I remember camping at Banning MN State Park, our campsite was right by the trailhead. This was great because they kids were younger (2, 4, and 6). We carried our 2 year-old a lot, and she also walked a bit. And our older two would get tired easiely. It was so nice to exit the tailhead and basically be at camp.
Where's the water?
If it's easy to tell where the drinking water is on the map, I take this into concideration, though it's lower priority. We usually bring a 5-gallon water cooler to fill with water, so we can have water at camp. That way we don't need to make as many trips to the water. Some campgrounds have sinks that they want you to wash dishes in. If that's the case, we try to be close to the sink so we don't have to travel far with our dirty dishes.
Where's the shade?
When looking at pictures of campsites, I look for campsites that have shade. Since we do most of our camping in the summer, we want to be able to have a cooler campsite so we're able to cool down a bit if it's going to be hot out. Espessially, a shadded spot for the tent.
What tent(s) are we bringing
Are we bringing one tent or two? Are we bringing the huge 10 person tent? Will the spot work for our tent situation? Sometimes this is hard to tell from pictures, but I defidently take this into concideration. Also, some sites may allow tents, but by looking at the pictures, I can tell that it's more of a camper campsite because it doesn't have a lot of flat areas for tents. Some sites we've been to, like Rocky Mountain National Park, they had a raised tent bed. This is fine if we're bringing one tent, but it can be chalanging when we bring two tents.
Electricity - do we need a charge?
Most of the time we don't worry about electricity. We have a small battery pack that we use to charge our phones, and my watch. On most of our national park trips, we are driving from hike to hike, so we have time to charge up if needed. We've only had issues at a few sites where we parked, and didn't move our vehicle much. In particular, I think of Zion National Park, we walked to the visitor center, then took the shuttle. We were there for 4 nights, and all of our batteries were getting very low in the end. We've also had this happen at a state park. We stayed for a week, only drove to town once, the rest of the time we did not get in our van. If this is something impartant to you, I'd defiantly take it into account.
Are the dogs coming?
Our dogs love camping and we bring them with when we can. If we know they are coming with us when we book the campsite, we look for sites that are further back from the road. We also look for sites that have a decent amount of room for them to move around in the campsite. Since they have to be on a leash in the campsite, we want to make sure they won't get tangeled up with us.
How close to the campground exit is the campsite?
This is important to take into consideration if we're going to be doing a lot of driving from the campsite. We don't want to spend a lot of time driving through the campground to exit. Especially with one-way roads.
Comments