travel dates: July, 2021
if you prefer your campground reviews in an audio format, you can hear me talk about this one on the RV Atlas podcast
I was very excited about North Beach Campground, partly because it’s right here on Lake Champlain:
And also because it’s right in the city of Burlington, and right on the bike path, so that we could ride our bikes downtown.
Except we didn’t bring our bikes.
We sold our toy hauler shortly before the summer trip and hadn’t yet figured out a good system for bringing bikes with the new trailer, so we decided to leave them behind. And Burlington was the only place we really missed them.
So: North Beach Campground is a great place to stay if you want to visit Burlington, VT, and it’s an even BETTER place to stay if you have bikes with you. (We did rent bikes one day, which I’ll talk about in my next post, but it’s not the same).
Location
North Beach Campground is a city run campground right in Burlington, about 2 miles from the downtown waterfront area, which you can get to via a bike path that runs right past the campground and along the lake. So it’s very convenient to get to anything in Burlington itself and much of it can be accessed easily via bike. We also spent a good bit of time in Shelburne, about 20 minutes away. There are a number of state parks and other natural areas nearby for hiking, and Montreal is less than 2 hours away, so reachable for a day trip, if Canada is open when you go (the border was still closed when we were there).
Booking and Arrival
I have a lot to say about this! This campground books up very fast (or at least it did in 2021), so you need to book as soon as they open up for reservations if you can. Last year when exactly that would be remained up in the air for a long time; I had to keep checking back until they finally announced the date. I just took a look before writing this and it looks like this year reservations open up for the season on April 1. I don’t remember what the date was last year, but I was online as soon as it happened, grabbed our site, and then checked again and noted that it would have been impossible to get a reservation if I’d been an hour late. Now, we stayed nearly a week, during dates that included a weekend and Monday, July 5 (so it overlapped people who were coming for the week of July 4 and that next weekend). If you need a few random days mid-week sometime it might not be so busy. But the campground definitely stayed very full while we were there. So book early! (but you can’t book too early, since they don’t open reservations until spring…so at least you don’t have to know your dates a year in advance).
Rates range from around $40-55, depending on type of site and season.
Getting to the campground also comes with some words of caution. You’ll be driving right through downtown Burlington to get to the campground. It’s not a huge city, but it is a city, with some narrow, one way streets, cars parked on the road, etc. As far as I can tell, there’s no real way to avoid the part where you come into town by driving fairly steeply downhill, stopping at a bunch of traffic lights, for quite awhile. This isn’t fun, but it’s manageable. At some point you’ll have to make a choice about where to turn right to head to the campground. The downtown is a grid, so there are many options, and your GPS might suggest any number of things, but we recommend Battery St. because it’s a 4 lane road with no street parking. From there it’s easy sailing to the campground.
Until you get to the entrance. There’s only one entrance for everyone to use, whether they’re coming to the campground or just headed to the beach for the day. This means things can get very backed up when the beach is busy on nice and/or weekend days, and you just have to wait in line with everyone paying to go to the beach. There’s no great place to pull over to check in, so you just have to do your best and then other people have to do their best to get around you. And THEN there’s a pretty narrow gate to navigate through. Someone from the office comes out to watch and make sure you don’t get into any trouble (or at least they did for us), and we made it without incident…but we weren’t sad that we didn’t have our bigger and wider toy hauler with us instead of the new trailer.
So nothing impossible (and we saw plenty of big motorhomes and fifth wheels in the campground), but just stuff to be aware of.
Campsites
I have a lot to say about this, too! This is a great campground, but it does come with a lot of caveats.
If you have a bigger RV, you probably want to reserve one of the full hook-up sites, either sites 1-16 along the main entrance road or sites 113-119 off by one of the tenting areas. The W/E sites are sort of scattered haphazardly in the center of the campground and many/most of them would be tricky for larger RVs.
We had site 6, and it was great–very easy to back into and very spacious:
A lot of the reviews I read complained about small sites, but we felt like ours was very spacious, particularly for a campground in an urban location. It was not, as you can see, very private, but we had lots of room to spread out.
As you can also see, these are just grass sites, so nothing fancy. Each site has a picnic table and a fire ring.
Our biggest complaint about our site was that there were tons of ants all over the place. Not really the campground’s fault, but definitely something to be aware of. We didn’t have any get into the trailer, thankfully, but we did end up abandoning a nice folding table when we left because it has ants all inside of it and we didn’t want to risk hitchhikers invading the trailer or the van.
Here are some of the other sites in that 1-19 row. Toward the end, some of the spaces do get shorter/more cramped:
And these are the other full hook up sites. You’d definitely have more privacy/quiet over there, since you don’t get all the traffic of people going to the beach…but it’s also farther from the beach:
Some of the W/E sites: mostly smaller trailers, though some people fit bigger ones in. But generally laid out fairly haphazardly; most of them were fairly cramped:
Amenities and Activities
The biggest “amenity” is the lake and beach right there, part of the same public park as the campground:
And at the beach, you’ll find a playground:
ice cream:
and a full service outdoor restaurant and bar, complete with live music some evenings. The food at the restaurant is below average, but the setting and the view and the proximity to the campground made it worthwhile (although we might just sit and have a beer instead of a full meal if we had it to do over again).
The beach is a short walk under the bike path from the campground…maybe a 5 minute walk, depending on which site you’re in:
Our 8 year old considered the big open field, perfect for throwing a baseball, right across from our site to be a major amenity. As did Fergus the terrier, who likes to roll around in grass.
The bathhouses are…very much what you’d expect from a busy public campground. They were not amazing, but they were fine.
For overall experience and location, I think this was probably my favorite campground of the summer. I’d love to go back sometime with bikes! Lots more on our stay in Burlington coming up next.
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