Recent Rocky Mountain/Blackhills trip

[G-V_Driver]

First stop was the Taos Valley campground in the south part of town in Taos. Very nice facilities for an in-town campground, and they have even planted some trees which will someday be nice sources of shade and add some atmosphere. It was well-located for our visit with friends and family. Level concrete wheel pads. Nice facilities. Dial-up modem available (BYOL--bring your own laptop) in office for a $1 fee.

Garden of the Gods Campground in Colorado Springs is a big, crowded city campground. Well managed with some nice touches (pancake breakfast and icecream nights) along with big trees, but more a holding area and RV park than scenic campground. Sites are very tight, no pull through's. We found that we agreed with several campers who mentioned that they tried to shoe-horn trailers into sites that weren't quite big enough.

Crooked Creek Campgrounds, Hill City SD. On the highway from Custer to Rapid City, but relatively quiet at night. Grassy campground with a good atmosphere. A referral from this site. The facilities are nice enough but far from opulent. Back-in dump station. New owners promising upgrades. Our favorable impressions were subjectively influenced by some great weather, campfires, steaks and wine.

National Park Retreat by Estes Park, CO. An impressive hillside campground with some neat sites that extend up the mountain. . . but if you want cable you have to go to the RV park at the top of the property. This part of the campground is a flat treeless sandy area with no personality and tight quarters. A referral from this site and a nice enough place, but sitting on bare dirt with the big rigs wasn't much fun. We would have enjoyed it more if we had been able to use one of the more picturesque and private sites rather than the RV area. Heavy rains made it even less attractive.

Los Rancheros south of Santa Fe has been our camping destination in Santa Fe since we started again in 1998. Quiet location (on an old hiway that now dead-ends just a couple miles further on, so very little traffic after dark). Nice sites, good facilities. Nice family atmosphere, cable and wifi. Movies every night and nice play area and pool for kids. Not fancy but functional and dependable. Dial-up internet avail BYOL.

Ridgeview RV Park, Breckenridge, TX. A bumper crop of mosquitos (that must have been on steroids, judging from their size and voraciousness) made our 8:30pm setup and first half-hour memorable, but that's about all. Nice folks, but there just aren't many RV's going that way. Pretty desolate. No real complaints other than the bugs, but hard to describe it as memorable.

Interestingly, only Taos Valley and Ridgeview had pull-through sites.

As perspective to our valuations, we have always liked the state parks and pretty places better than the commercial campgrounds. With the pop-ups we really didn't care about or need the hookups. With the TM we found ourselves gravitating to campgrounds with more amenities (due more to me than DW). Maybe due to the Olympics, maybe due to age, maybe to the camping vs. RV-ing issues discussed in another post. We probably need to go again without the outside pressures (and some of the electric gadgets) and get back to the places we liked so much before. Not that we didn't have a good trip, but it was different. We plan to try it again in the Fall, and I will be interested in our reaction when it's over.

Wayne