It’s finally here! The very last post about our summer 2021 trip! Don’t worry; I’m still behind, as I have a couple of winter/spring trips to blog about, too, before I turn my attention fully to summer of 2022. But I can see the possibility of actually being all caught up glimmering in the far distance ahead of me now. Cold winter nights of blogging and trip planning are kind of my favorite, so it’s all good.
Anyway, today I’m going to talk about our base for exploring Cincinnati: the FMCA campground, a members only campground just a few minutes from downtown. Now, if I had completed this post in a more timely manner, I’d be telling you about how you can stay there for FREE with your FMCA membership. But it looks as though they’ve changed things since we stayed, and now the cost is $15/night for 2 nights and then $30/night after that (maximum of 7 days/month). It’s still a bargain for a full hookup site in a great location, but it’s not quite as great as before. And, honestly, we bought our FMCA membership specifically so that we could stay in the campground; I’m not sure I’d buy one to get the $15/night price. But definitely worth a look if you’re already an FMCA member, and we enjoyed our time there.
Location
The FMCA campground is about a 20 minute drive from downtown Cincinnati, so very convenient for exploring the city. It’s in a suburban area, so there’s plenty of shopping, restaurants, and parks very near by. We enjoyed eating (and drinking) at Fifty West Brewing Company, less than a 5 minute drive away. They had a creative menu full of burgers and beer and tons of outdoor space:
And we had some great ice cream at Graeter’s, also a very quick drive:
Booking and Arrival
You have to book online, and they let you select a site. It does tend to fill up, which I imagine is why the two free nights are no longer on offer. Some of the reviews cautioned not taking the Roundbottom Road route to the campground, which for us meant staying on 275 longer than our GPS wanted us to. I don’t know if the other route is really that bad, but there are some surprisingly hilly roads in the Cincinnati area, so we were happy to play it safe. There’s no office (the campground is on the site of the FMCA headquarters) and no dedicated campground staff, although when we arrived there was someone hanging out at the entrance with a clipboard checking people in. But, yeah, it’s not a campground in the traditional sense, though it does have nice and spacious campsites.
Campsites
There are 15 full hookup sites at the FMCA campground, with nice concrete pads and good spacing and grass between each site. Then there’s a row of 9 w/e sites, which are used more as overflow spaces and are not nearly as nice–pretty much just a row of asphalt parking spaces packed close together. So needless to say you want one of the full hookup sites if you can get one. Here’s a blurry iPhone picture of the overflow sites; as you can see, they fill up, too!
We originally had two nights booked and then added on another one, so we ended up needing to change sites after our first night. Our first site was #15, the first one on your left as you pull into the campground; we had tons of room since it was on the end:
There’s a big circle to turn around in and nicely angled spots, so it’s easy to get around and all of the sites are easy to back into (until recently FMCA was only open to motorhome owners, so the campground is definitely big rig friendly).
We really loved our next site, though; we had #12, in the cul-de-sac at the end of the campground, and we were right next to the dog park, so tons of open space next to us there, too. Plus we had a picnic table. Some sites had picnic tables and some didn’t.
Really, any of the full hookup sites are perfectly nice (though we might have somehow gotten the two best!)
Amenities
Nope. None of those. Well, there’s a surprisingly huge dog park:
But aside from that there aren’t really any facilities: no bathhouse or laundry, no office or campstore. The campground does back up to a park with a small lake, and there’s a nice walking trail around it. We took the dogs around one evening and ran into a film crew making a movie. I can no longer remember what the movie was, but we looked it up when we got back to the trailer, and it was a legit movie with famous people and everything.
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