travel dates: July, 2024
I was pretty excited to stay at Wesley Clover Parks. For one thing, I like the name. Also, we’d had a stay booked here several years ago that we’d had to cancel because Canada was closed for Covid, so there was quite a bit of built up anticipation. And it’s just a 20 minute drive from downtown Ottawa, and I really appreciated finding such a conveniently located campground on this trip full of big cities and long commutes in.
And…it was a bit of a mixed bag. Overall it was a good experience, though, and we’d probably stay there again if we found ourselves needing to park the RV in proximity to Ottawa. Especially if we could come a different time of year and avoid mosquito season. There: I’ve already told you the most annoying thing about our stay!
Location
As I mentioned, the big thing Wesley Clover has going for it is that it’s in Ottawa, a very reasonable drive to the downtown area and all the touristy stuff. It’s also less than 20 minutes from the Diefenbunker, where we went on our non-Ottawa day, so that was a bonus for us. There’s also a bike path that runs all the way into the city (I think it’s around 10 miles each away). We never saw it, but there was one iteration of our itinerary that had us bringing the bikes along for the trip and spending a day on said bike path. We mostly spent our time in the city/at the Diefenbunker, but we did check out and enjoy Big Rig Brewery, about 10 minutes from the campground, for dinner one night:
You can read about all the stuff we did in Ottawa here!
Booking and Arrival
I just looked back through my e-mails and saw that we booked near the end of December 2023 for our July stay. I also found an e-mail from November where I asked when they’d be taking reservations for the next year, and they responded and said they didn’ have a date yet and were still finalizing rates and whatnot. My general experience with Canadian campgrounds is that it’s very rare that anyone’s thinking about booking a year in advance like you find in some popular areas in the US. It was busy while we were there, but it’s a large campground, and I don’t think it was ever completely full…so what I’m saying is you’ll likely be able to get a site fairly late in the game if you’re not picky. Sites this year are around $65CAD for W/E.
I have a lot more to say about the arrival part of this review than I usually do, because it was a little dramatic. We had a short drive here from Upper Canada Village, so we arrived at 12:30, half an hour before official check-in time. They checked us in no problem, though, and we headed to our site. I had booked one of the few pull-throughs in a row at the far end of the campground. Most of the sites are wooded back-ins, but I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to maneuver, so I grabbed a big rig friendly pull-through in an open area to be safe. Only there was still someone in our site. Or rather, someTHING in our site–a big fifth wheel with no truck in the site and no people around. We pulled into the empty site next door and attempted to call the office to see what was up. They did not answer. We were now as far as possible from the office in a very large, sprawling campground, but I started to walk back there to talk to them, since we didn’t really know what else to do. I got maybe halfway there before Dave called to say the guy had shown up and moved…to another site farther down the row. So I returned. But there’s more! We got in the site and started to set up, only to find our surge protector giving out a low voltage warning. We went to talk to the guy who had just been in the site, and he said he hadn’t had any trouble. Someone from the campground came by on a golf cart, and we flagged him down. He had a voltmeter which confirmed there were issues with fluctuating voltage, but said that it might be days before they could get an electrician out and that they might need to move us to a site that didn’t have 30 amps. This would not work for us. Somehow he found a 30 amp site nearby that we could move to. We walked over to look at it and discovered it was a HUGE wooded back-in that looked very nice. Meanwhile the electrician showed up in like half an hour instead of 3 days and got the electricity working very quickly. But by then we’d decided to move to the huge wooded site anyway. There. That’s the end of the saga! It was maybe not all that interesting, but it made arrival a bit stressful. That probably won’t happen to you if you stay here, though!
Campsites
The vast majority of the campsites at Wesley Clover are in a series of heavily wooded loops, all back-ins with varying degrees of electric and not (i.e. there are 30 amp, 15 amp, and non-serviced sites, many with water, none with sewer). But there’s also a row of 8 long 30 amp/water pull-throughs. I booked one of these because it was really hard to tell online how accessible the wooded back-ins would be for our (32 foot) trailer. It turns out a lot of them were totally fine and some were kind of iffy. So you can see our site up there; I don’t seem to have noted the exact site number anywhere, but it was in loop 3C. Very long, and very private, with enough greenery that we couldn’t see our neighbors on either side. The pull-throughs, in contrast, are completely out in the open:
Weird thing about the pull-throughs is that you have to wind your way through the entire campground, with fairly narrow roads, to get to them–the most big rig-friendly sites in the campground by far. There’s actually a driveway out onto the main road right there (you can see it on the campground map, and I can confirm that it’s there in real life) that would give you extremely easy access in and out…but there’s a gate across the road that’s always locked.
So! Again, our site was totally lovely:
…and the mosquitos thought so, too. This is, of course, not the campground’s fault, but there were so many mosquitos when we were here in early July that we didn’t really get to enjoy the lovely site much. I’m curious if we would have had better luck if we’d stuck with our original pull-through site since it wasn’t so wooded.
Apparently I wanted to tell you all about 3D? (in cluster 3). I think I thought it looked like a nice site with good access for bigger rigs.
Amenities
Okay, so here’s the thing Wesley Clover could do something about: these bathhouses were not great. Here’s what my notes say: “dated, moldy, spider webs not cleaned up from day to day…also mosquitos bit you whenever you tried to use bathroom. Which was very unpleasant.” So pretty much everything that can be wrong with bathhouses: they need updating, which is a big fix, but also they just weren’t kept clean, which isn’t. And with a bonus of getting mosquito bites while you pee. And, of course, there’s no sewer connection at the campsites, so the state of the bathhouses takes on more importance, particularly for longer stays.
We didn’t make use of the other amenities–there is laundry by the front office, and there’s a store there, although I’m not sure what they sell. There’s a playground. There’s a wifi hotspot at the office, but it doesn’t reach the sites.
Alright, so! Again, I’d probably pick Wesley Clover again for an Ottawa visit, despite the issues. I’d try to hit it in not-mosquito season, whenever that is. We also really need to up our mosquito-defense game at our campsite, although I don’t really know how. Other than setting up our screen room more often. Maybe we’ll start doing that. Anyway, onwards to Montreal next time!
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