Living Forest Oceanside Campground

We stayed at Living Forest for one week in October, 2013. We had such a good experience that when we needed a place for an extended stay on Vancouver Island in October-November 2015 the choice was easy.

Living Forest is located on the edge of Nanaimo but with 53 acres of well forested land you wouldn't know the city was there. Most sites are well forested with the exception of the sites overlooking the Nanaimo River estuary (note what are called Oceanside or Oceanview are really the estuary). It's a large park with over 300 sites but with 53 acres in the park, the sites are well spaced. The sites are generally level with a combination of back-in and pull through (there are even some "nose in" sites for class A's so they can enjoy the view of the estuary). Most sites are full hook-up including basic cable a minority of sites are electricity only or unserviced (for tenters).

Staff have been incredibly friendly and helpful - this may be in part due to the fall season when the park is only partly full and most residents are staying for the winter so there is a real camaraderie between people. Twice the park management organized events, an outdoor movie/BBQ night (OK it got rained out) and a pot luck dinner in the lounge. The lounge has laundry facilities, a kids playroom and an adult area. This lounge has free Wi-Fi; otherwise you must pay for Wi-Fi in the park from Tengo. Clean restrooms are scattered throughout the park and the main ones were kept warm (we were there in the fall); the showers are coin operated.

There are several thoughtful touches in the park, one of which is a free air compressor to adjust tires pressure on your vehicle or RV (the first time I've seen that). Any maintenance issues were dealt with promptly. There is a nice grocery store at the intersection of the road to the park plus an excellent coffee shop (Serious Coffee). Propane delivered to your site is also available.

The rate quoted above is the daily winter rate; the monthly rate we paid was $395 plus electricity. The high season daily rate for our Forest Back-in would be $45 per day.

We had good Bell Mobility cell service.

Well maintained park really close to Nanaimo. Sites are large and flat. Easy to park and not too close to other sites. Because this park is built on a hill, it's terraced so that lots of sites have amazing views of the water. It was amazingly quiet, considering it's summer and the park was pretty much full. The little cafe is a great place to get a mocha, latte or a hand-scooped ice cream cone. The beach is small, but nice.

We were able to hike upstream from the swimming beach to let our dog go swimming, which was nice. The trash area was limited to the dumpsters by the office, but they had recycle and composting trash bins, as well.

Shower facilities were clean and you could buy tokens for the showers ($1 for 5 minutes). They have wifi by the office and cafe for free, or you could buy wifi for $4/24 hours. I wouldn't waste my money on the wifi, it was crap.

We would definitely go back and next time I'd spring for one of the "ocean side" sites - but the "ocean view" sites were pretty awesome, too.

There are over 300 sites here. So when my other plans fell through on a holiday weekend in August in this area, they fit me into the Group Camping area. Less than ideal as the quarters were close, but it would be a great place to stay if you got one of the ocean view sites, or at least a bit more privacy than I had. I was still grateful that they could take me at all! Nice little beach for swimming and kayaking and a lovely trail around the campground where I saw Bald Eagles and Pileated woodpeckers. Good laundry and showers (must get token at the office) as one would expect.

Stayed here in October of 2014 and this is a park where I would love to spend a week! The area around it is so beautiful. The park is large but so are the sites and well planted for privacy. It's on a bit of a hill and it is well terraced so that while other a few have waterfront a lot of the others are great unobstructed views, like being on bleachers. Lots of good walking in the area and small wildlife. Love watching the times vary by 3m or more.

We booked here for two different stays this summer and after the first, we cancelled the 2nd. The campground is great with lots of trees, mostly private sites, good water access and close by to Nanaimo. However, this is an older resort and the internal roads are extremely tight. I think I'm a pretty good driver and this campground was really scary in a 45ft class A. It felt like a super tight slalom course, but instead of flags there were trees, other campers pickups close to the lanes and lots of landscaping. We actually ended up hitting something that damaged the lower part of the curb side of our coach, but I have no idea where it happened as there were so many places it could have happened. We have a 2005 Newell so tall, wide but sits low and has a steerable tag. If you have a 45ft that sits a bit higher, you would probably have missed whatever we hit, but you had better be pretty good to miss all of the trees, landscaping and kids everywhere. If you stayed in one of the outer sites and stayed off the inner roads, you might have better luck. We did have an out site for our 2nd visit, but because I'm not sure where we hit, in the end I thought it too risky to go back. We've been traveling in BC for 2 months and this is by far the tightest campground we have visited. We now are pre-driving all campgrounds in the tow vehicle.

Wifi is $4 per day and US ATT was slow and almost unusable.

We had a reservation for 2 weeks that we made 10 months in advance but later had to change to arrive a few days later. They wouldn't change the booking so we had to pay for the extra days we weren't there. Fair enough. The roads in the campground are very tight and we had a tough time backing into our site due to the narrow road and that we couldn't pull forward on the other side of the street. We're full time and it took us longer to get in this campground than any other we've been to in many months (and we move every 1-2 weeks). The setting itself is nice and we could see the water from our site, but our 35' rig and truck parked sideways BARELY fit in the site and it was supposed to be a 45' site. We put our kayak in the water a few times as well and that was convenient. Some of the reasons I would not stay here again are the location, wifi, and kids. The location is in the south part of town and not far from downtown but you have to drive everywhere. And it wasn't great for running or biking from the campground. The wifi was horrible and we had to pay for it, per device. It was unusable many times and really frustrating. And driving around the campground was tough because there are tons of kids on bikes. This is totally fine and we've been in many campgrounds full of kids on bikes, but this place was different. It was like parents don't watch their kids AT ALL. We had kids riding right in front of our truck without looking many times. Even as we're trying to leave and pull out with our trailer, several kids on bikes are going immediately in front of our truck as we're trying to pull forward to get our rig out of the site. I wouldn't stay here again.