Travel dates: May 29-June 1, 2018
I think of Washington, DC as right up there near the top of the list of cities you’d rather not get anywhere near with a car, much less a giant RV. Given this, there are a surprising number of reasonable campground options near the city. I mean, you’re not going to back your trailer in somewhere and have a view of the Washington Monument or anything, but there are quite a few public and private options that will put you under an hour from downtown. The private ones will also set you back a hefty chunk of change, so we took a look at the public options instead and ended up at Lake Fairfax County Park in Reston, VA.
And it turned out to be a great, hidden gem kind of a place! It was easy to get into the city, close to plenty of shopping and restaurants, and the park itself had some nice amenities. All for half the price of private options nearby.
Booking and Arrival
I wish that I could remember how exactly we booked our site, because then I could tell you how to avoid getting assigned the one we did. You have to call to reserve your site (reservations for the year open up the first business day in January), so my guess is we called and, not knowing anything about the campground, just let them assign whatever site they wanted to us. So I’m going to try to give you some tips about picking a site. Although this would be easier if I could find the list I made when I was there of sites that looked good. Oops. ANYWAY, though, there are more good sites than bad, so don’t worry too much.
The park is easy to access; just make sure you get there before traffic gets bad if you’re going on a weekday. When you get into the park, you stop by the main office to check in. When we were there on a Tuesday afternoon in late May, there was plenty of space in the parking lot for RVs; I could see things getting a little tricky on a busy weekend, though.
The office is staffed by teenage kids who are likely not experts on RVing (the campground is not the main attraction at Lake Fairfax; I’m sure they have many other talents, these kids). When you check in, they look up your reservation in a giant, ancient book, where everything is recorded in pencil. When we booked the site months in advance, it was $45 (for a 50 amp, electric only site), but the price had gone up to $50 at some point in the interim, and we were charged the new rate. Which was a little annoying, but not enough to argue about. (Although I just checked the website, and it still lists the price for weekdays as $45. Hmm…..) The check-in process went smoothly, but it took quite awhile; they wanted both license plate numbers (from van and trailer), so be prepared with that to save some time running back out.
The campground is up a surprisingly steep hill from the main office, but nothing that’s hard to handle.
Campsites
Okay, here begins our saga. We were assigned to site 54, which–there’s really no other way to put this–sucked.
It was supposed to be a gravel site, but all the gravel was worn away, leaving mud behind (with tons of rain in the forecast). It was barely long enough for the trailer. Then I opened up the electric box to find several wasps busily building a nest inside, which was kind of the last straw. There were tons of empty sites around that looked way better, so we called the office–the office with the high school kids who knew nothing about RVs–to see if we could change.
They were very accommodating and gave us a list of open sites to pick from. First we asked about 30 amp sites since we only have 30 amps anyway and those are cheaper. Then we realized all the 30 amp sites are really short (and, in most cases, very sloped as well) and not good for long trailers. So we had to call back again and get ANOTHER list.
But! After circling around the campground about three times (on one of these circles we remembered that we didn’t have a water hookup here and to fill up our tank at the spigot, so that was good) we finally got settled into A16, a very nice site in an open, grassy area (it’s possible we had wound up in crappy site 54 in the beginning because we told them we wanted a shady site. who knows?)
I would recommend most of the sites in this open area, which is to say sites 1-24 and 58-72. We were very happy with ours, which was flat and easy to get into and had plenty of space between us and our neighbors. There are a few nice sites in the shady area (39-55), but overall they are….iffier. The rest of the sites are no hook-up or the short 30 amp sites.
The campground stayed maybe 2/3 full while we were there, mid-week in late May/early June. I’m sure it fills up on summer weekends, so plan accordingly.
This is one of the nicer looking shady spots, but it doesn’t have hook-ups:
The roads were nice and wide and easy to navigate (we really got a chance to test this out since we drove around so many times):
And it rained and rained and RAINED one night while we were there, so we were able to observe that the drainage (in the sites where there’s actually gravel anyway) works pretty well.
Amenities and Activities
At the campground itself there’s a very nice, newer bathhouse:
There are several separate shower rooms–huge rooms with sinks and toilets in them. The drainage isn’t terrific in these, but other than that they’re very nice. You can also see the water fill up and dump station right there–very easy to get to and use.
There’s no wifi, but our Verizon signal was very good.
The park itself has lots going on. There are sports fields, the lake (which you can walk to a nice overlook close to the campground), and a skateboard park. But the main attraction is the water park–the Water Mine Family Swimmin’ Hole–which looks very impressive, but which wasn’t open when we were there. It’s open every day when school is out in the area, but it was still only open weekends when we were there. There’s an extra fee ($16 for 48″ and up), and it has lots of waterslides, a lazy river, little kid area, etc. etc.
Local Area
We were here to see Washington, DC, and we felt really well positioned for this. The traffic was never terrible getting in or out of the city (surprisingly), and we always made it in well under an hour. The first day it took us 45 minutes from the time we left until we parked (near the Jefferson Memorial).
You can also easily take public transportation; the campground’s less than 10 minutes from the closest metro station (in Reston). We went back and forth for a long time about whether to drive or take the train in before finally opting to drive. The train station is in downtown Reston, where you’ll also find plenty of shopping and restaurants.
maybe you would like to pin this?
Wasps. OK. This is a hazard of campgrounds that I had not considered before….
to be fair, it’s a hazard on our back porch, too….
It’s the unexpectedness. I realized how infrequently my father drove his car instead of his truck when I borrowed it and went to put gas in it, and there was an abandoned wasp nest under the gas cap door.
We have found wasps to be something expected because of their nature to build nests in small sheltered spots. This happens even in well-used campgrounds. We carry wasp spray and also alert the campground hosts.
yeah, I wasn’t really upset to find the wasps; I know from experience that wasps can be anywhere! It was more just one last sign that we should call and ask for a different site 🙂