travel dates: July, 2021
You can listen to me talking about Wayne County Fairgrounds and our trip to Detroit on the RV Atlas Podcast
There’s something about the challenge of finding good RV camping near big cities that appeals to me. Sometimes it’s pretty straightforward, and there’s a solid campground very close to the city (the Philadelphia South KOA). Other times you have to get more creative and/or figure out what tradeoffs to make (close to the city at Liberty Harbor RV Park near NYC vs. further out but cheaper and with a lot more space at Croton Point Park). But we’ve pretty much always found that it’s possible to RV camp reasonably close to major cities.
Our pick for our visit to Detroit, after considering some options farther away and some with poorer reviews, was Wayne County Fairgrounds RV Park in Belleville, MI, about half an hour from Detroit and half an hour in the other direction from Ann Arbor. We made some changes to our itinerary at the last minute and ended up staying here for a full week. This place does have some drawbacks, which I’ll get to–it’s essentially a big field with pretty tight sites–but it’s a convenient and safe spot for visiting Detroit, Ann Arbor, and the nearby Henry Ford Museum…and it has some pretty impressive sunsets as a bonus.
Location
Belleville itself seems to be a fairly boilerplate suburb of Detroit, with lots of strip malls and chain restaurants; there’s a Walmart directly behind the fairgrounds, even. (I felt bad about calling Belleville boilerplate, so I just peeked at its Wikipedia entry; apparently they have a strawberry festival there, and it’s sometimes called “the birthplace of techno music.” So there you go. There’s also the Yankee Air Museum just five minutes from the campground, which we didn’t make it to). So you’ll have access to plenty of shopping right by the campground as well as a pretty easy drive into Detroit or Ann Arbor. It’s about 20 minutes from the Henry Ford. It’s also less than 20 minutes from Ypsilanti, and we ended up heading that way a few times for dinner and found it a fun little town with a good assortment of restaurants.
My favorite was probably the Corner Brewery, with its huge, family friendly outdoor area:
We also visited the fun Depot Town area twice and enjoyed Sidetrack Bar and Grill and Aubree’s Pizzeria there…and, bonus, you can watch trains go by while you eat!
Booking and Arrival
Wayne County has a variety of sites–full hook-ups and W/E, pull throughs and back ins. We booked a W/E site back when we were only planning to stay 4 nights…it was easy to add on 3 more nights when we needed to at the last minute, but all the full hook-up sites were booked already by then. So we ordered a blue tank and had it shipped there (and the office staff was very accommodating and had no problem accepting a package for us, even a very big one), so we could dump the gray water a couple of times. Rates range from $27/night for a 30 amp w/e back in to $44/night for a full hook-up pull-through. That rate includes 2 adults and up to 4 kids and they do offer Good Sam discounts. Booking has to be done over the phone. The campground is easy to access from the interstate.
Campsites
As I mentioned, we tried and failed to switch our reservation to a full hook up site, but that might have actually been a good thing. As it was, we ended up in a W/E pull through at the back of the campground, where it was not especially crowded and we had a good bit more room to spread out than we would have in the fully booked FHU section:
Those are the full hook up sites up there, I believe. In contrast, here was us:
However! In between us and that other camper? Is an empty site. The sites in our section were set up like buddy sites, with camper doors facing each other. That site next to ours stayed empty the whole time we were there, but had anyone been there, it would have been extremely cozy.
In this photo, you can see how close we were to the camper next to us on the other side; our slides were nearly touching:
That said, they seem to make an effort to stagger the occupied sites when possible so that you have a little space. But if the campground were full, we would have felt very cramped, and hanging out in our site would not have been pleasant. So something to keep in mind.
Sites are grass, with picnic tables.
Mysteriously, they put almost no one in another part of the W/E section
Not sure if these are full hook up or W/E, but they’re some back in sites, and, as you can see, they back up to another camper.
Amenities
I’ll just go ahead and say it: the bathhouses here are not so nice. They’re cleaned regularly, but they’re VERY dated and just pretty unpleasant. We used them a lot, too, since we only had a W/E site and were there for a full week. My kids very much objected to how low the doors are and how the ones in the men’s room at least didn’t lock. I basically just objected to how run down they were overall.
There are two bathhouses, but the one up near the office was out of service almost the whole time we were there. And the other one is conveniently located to a lot of the sites (including the FHU ones), but quite a hike from the W/E sites along the back. BUT! I noted on their website that they’re “taking bids” for new bathhouses, so it looks like they’ll be getting upgraded soon. There’s also a laundry room in that building.
Broken bathhouse (but nice landscaping!):
Aside from that, you don’t get a lot of amenities here. It’s a fairgrounds. There’s a gazebo you could hang out in if you want!
One last thing to mention is that the list of rules here is a little…unorthodox. Specifically, they say you can’t walk your dogs anywhere but along the back and one side of the campground and that you can’t let your dog go to the bathroom in “the camping area” or they can kick you out of the campground. I found this a little inconvenient, since our dogs would have really enjoyed going for longer walks around the extensive (and largely empty) fairgrounds and a little stressful since there’s really no way for me to stop my dogs from peeing or pooping in the camping area while in route to the approved dog walk area (we, of course, always clean up after them). So I don’t know strictly this is enforced or if they would actually have evicted us if they’d spotted one of our boy dogs peeing on the way to the back of the park, but…I thought it was a little much. But…minor complaint!
More on what we did while we stayed here coming up soon!
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