Bar Harbor Oceanside KOA Campground Review

The conventional wisdom about the Bar Harbor Oceanside KOA is that it’s an amazing campground….if you can get one of the oceanfront sites. So we dutifully got online the first day reservations opened up to snag one, and it was well worth planning for. Waking up to that view every day was incredible, we loved being able to walk along the water right from our site, and the location was great for exploring Acadia National Park

Booking and Arrival

As mentioned, if you want to snag a waterfront site (you do), you have to jump on your reservations as soon as possible. I just went back through my e-mails (because I never delete e-mails and very occasionally this is a good thing), and it looks like we booked on November 2. Which might actually have been the second day reservations were open. So if you’re looking at summer of 2019 you might already be out of luck for an oceanfront site (depending on your dates; I just put in some midweek in early June to test, and there’s still availability). Looking forward to 2020 and beyond, I’d call well in advance to find out when reservations are opening up and then be ready to call the day they do to get the best chance at a great site.

There’s no other way to put this: if you want an oceanfront site here, you’re going to pay an awful lot of money. We payed $112/night, and it looks like it’s up to $123 for next summer (that’s with 4 kids). This is probably the most expensive campsite we’ve ever stayed in.

We arrived late afternoon and someone guided us to our site…

Campsites

…which was a pretty tricky site to get into, owing to some big rocks:

The waterfront sites (or at least ours) are kind of parallel to the road, so you pull past your site and then angle it and back in….which in our case meant trying to negotiate around these boulders without getting the van stuck on them. And we managed, but it was a little scary. Of course, our van rides pretty low compared to a lot of tow vehicles (our trailer, on the other hand, has more clearance than average).

But, of course, the other thing to notice about this site (I think it was site 340. I really need to start remembering to write that down every time) is the lovely, lovely view. We had beach access, but with a fairly sharp drop off. When we first got there, it was high tide and the water came up pretty much to the bottom of that drop off (i.e. our site kind of dropped off into water)….but later on at low tide we realized that we had quite a bit of rocky beach to walk along most of the time:

All the waterfront sites are water/electric only, but word is they do have a pump out service available if needed (we were just there three nights, so we didn’t use it).

Apparently I took no pictures whatsoever of the other sites in the campground. I will say that if I had it to over again, I’d ask for a different waterfront site, both because of the rocks at the front of ours and because it was a bit of a climb getting down to the beach and back up again.

As for the non-waterfront sites, most of them are in a big, open field–pretty standard sites, fairly closely packed. There’s nothing wrong with them, but there’s not anything special about them, either.

Amenities and Activities:

This is a big, bustling campground with a ton going on. There’s a full schedule of activities….they all started the week after we left, though, so I can’t tell you much about them 🙁 . But if you’re there in the high season, you’ll have lots to choose from.

They did have lobster dinners for sale while we were there; Dave’s parents got these one evening and spoke highly of them.

The bathhouses were in good shape and clean (a bit of a hike from the waterfront sites). There are separate shower stalls with locking doors, which I always like.

There’s a lovely public area by the water where you can hang out and catch a sunset:

Local Area:

Acadia is a sprawling kind of park, so there’s going to be a lot of driving to get around, but we found this KOA to be well situated for park touring. It’s about 20 minutes into downtown Bar Harbor and about 15 minutes to the park’s main visitor center. Other places in the park might take you half an hour or 45 minutes to get to, but nothing is super far away.

Next up: onward to Canada!

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