DThomas96

We stayed here one night. It is a big empty gravel lot located between I-5 and two motels (currently a Best Western and Quality Inn). I asked someone at the Best Western about the lot and they told me truckers seem to use it a lot for overnight. We parked to the left side as you enter the lot, but others parked to the right as well. Had an easy time leveling the trailer as the lot is fairly level. Two other RV's showed up later as well as several Semi-trucks. Bit of road noise from I-5, but not too bad and didn't bother us. Some decent restaurants across the street as well as several fast food choices.

Considering it is just off of I-5 with very easy access and all of the services available within a short walk make this a great location for a free one-night stop over. We would stay again.

This is an RV camp located at Port Hueneme Naval Base and requires proper military ID to enter. Access to Port Hueneme Naval Base is harder than it should be as GPS tries to take you to a closed gate. There are two gates in operation, one is only during regular operating hours M-F. The staff is okay when you can find them. We had to extend our stay for a couple of days and it took me 4 trips to the office to finally find someone.

There are two bath/shower/laundry buildings and only one near the office is properly maintained. The other, which we were near, had a fire alarm continually beep during our stay because it needed a new battery. The showers in the second building quickly ran out of hot water, at times where you could actually get hot water. Another guest told me it was probably because most guests are parked near the second building and do their laundry there and likely use up the hot water. I find that hard to believe, unless they have a garbage hot water heater, which they probably do. The hand dryer does not work in the mens room, nor the shower heaters (they did work in the main building).

There is no kids playground, nor a decent place for kids to play safely. The dog runs are a joke (tiny) and it seems few people pick up after their pets so we stayed away from them. You really need a decent size dog run that gets watered down every few days or at least once a week otherwise they begin to smell like an alley behind a bar. They also did not provide any doggie dodo bags but they had lots of dispensers around the camp.

The spaces are pull through and roughly level. By that each driveway seems to be made of about three sections with the front and back sections slightly sloped for drainage. We did not need leveling blocks.

Landscaping is fine, but minimal. Spaces are decorated with crushed rock which is appropriate for a more desert climate like they have. Hookups worked fine and did not have any issues. Some of the machines in the laundry room were not working, but enough to get laundry done.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the price. You might think after reading the above that I'm complaining a lot about a little. Fair enough, but when you charge $65 a night (I pay $5 more as a retired DOD civilian) I at least, expect everything to work. A lot of military RV campgrounds are also using the RV revenue as a "bill payer" for other MWR activities which I personally think is inappropriate. I worked acquisition in the Pentagon for 20 years and I can guarantee you there is some loose change that could be found to properly fund MWR without placing that burden on RV campers. So It is one thing to charge $65/night when you are sold out most of the time or at least mostly full, but this place was 80 percent EMPTY!

Most military campgrounds charge between $15 and $40 a night, so if you are going to charge at lest 50-percent more, you better have a pristine sight where everything works. As an example, the California National Guard Camp at San Luis Obispo charged us $30 a night, had decent sites, a pristine bath house, and is 10 minutes from Morro Bay and beaches. Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson is $15 a night or less for dry camping, and (I think) it is about $30 to $35 a night for hookups (I'll update once we stay there next week).

Individual ratings: Access/Location is mostly straightforward but I dinged the sight location as it is a long drive from the freeway to the base and sometimes the gates are not opened as scheduled if they are having an exercise or drill. If that happens (which they did while we were there) and you have to drive all the way around the other side of the base and find the open gate to get in. Also, the RV park is not anywhere near the water/beach. Cleanliness is more about the dog runs, but the second bath house could use some maintenance and better water drainage in the showers. Also the showers need to update the soap holders. None of the holders have drains so you are essentially placing your soap, razor, etc. in a cup of water. Site Quality refers to the individual campsite only, not the overall park. Noise - It's a military base, so you just deal with it.

My overall feel for this place is poor leadership and management, disconnected staff, and a general "could care less" vibe permeates everywhere.

We are now staying at Camp Pendleton San Onofre Beach RV park and the rate is the same, the showers are actually worse than Port Hueneme (despite outward appearances, the bathhouse is actually open to the elements with clever privacy walls but it is cold as heck in the winter), BUT we have a direct view of the ocean, the staff is always on-hand if you have a question, and the place is about 75 to 80 percent full if not more.

Unfortunately camping or even overnight RV parking is difficult to find in the Port Hueneme area, so this may be your only option. There is another RV park / Navy Lodge in nearby Point Mugu NAS, we drove by and will likely try that next time as it is located directly on the beach.

I can confirm the other reviewers comments about having to play to stay. I spoke to the casino security office and they said that in order to stay in our RV overnight in the parking lot we had to not only purchase a "players club card" but we also had to actually play the slot machines or whatever until we got to some number of points. Once we had enough points we could stay overnight.

I don't jump through hoops for anyone in order to stay overnight. We found a golf course nearby using Harvest Hosts and bought dinner at the golf course club house where they served a surprisingly excellent Rubin sandwich.

We stayed in the older “premium” area and loved it. As others have said it is a nice park with everything you need nearby (bathroom/showers, gas and propane, even a few restaurants on base). Of course you will need an active or retired military or civilian ID to access the area. This is a short review, as I completely agree with the other reviews posted here.

The boon docking sites around the East side of Zion are often treacherous due to the amount of sand. I scouted out several listed here in Campendium with my 4WD F150 and would not take out camper down to most of the sites. There is just a LOT of sand everywhere in this area. However, this spot is easy to get to, and has a large flat area for a lot of campers. We did not stay and opted to drive to Bryce instead, but this would have been a good spot for an overnight with no worries about getting stuck.

We have stayed at this location multiple times, the last being about 8 months ago. I called today to verify and was told it would be okay to stay overnight one night. I'll report back of that turns out to be mistaken.

They are allowing one or two nights in their parking lot provided you tell them you will be there. This is the only Walmart (Ten Mile Road) in the area that allows this, so please treat the place respectfully.

As the other reviewer noted, this is easy to get to. I've attached a panorama shot of the area to compliment the other pics, and circled three spots for people to camp. The spots on either end are very large with room for two small travel trailers each, or one big rig. The spot in the middle is suitable for a small travel trailer, truck camper, etc, but I did not see a fire ring. There is a fire ring on the two big spots. There are also a few spots as you drive in, but are in the woods, not out in the open. We did not have any cell service here (T-Mobile). We camped in the same spot as the previous reviewer and as they noted, the spot was so level we did not even have to use leveling blocks or even detach our trailer. We were the only one's there that night (mid-October). I should mention that the road comes into this site from the trees, not from the road where I took the photo.

About the area in general - driving here from Utah, you will run into a lot of burned-out areas along the way. However, we saw multiple boon docking opportunities along the route within 10 to 20 miles of the park. So many in fact, that I have a hard time believing you could not find a spot somewhere on one of the forest roads off the highway. I feel bad about the fires there, however it makes it much easier to see boon docking opportunities.

I've done a lot of boondock camping, and it is unfortunate there is almost no information on the web posted about camping in this area, and what is posted is vague and incomplete, so I hope this review helps with that.

This is in the BLM managed Oregon Badlands, and there are many places you can camp and setup your gear. This area is also home to the Bend Aero Modelers (you can Google Map search that as well). I like to do astrophotography and as best I can tell from the maps and color scales, this is a Bortle 3 dark sky. There was some light dome coming from Bend and Redmond, but it was not bad and most of the Milky Way is clearly visible.

Arriving from Bend (traveling east) you turn left off of Hwy 20 at the Oregon Badlands sign. This road has no name that I am aware of. You have two options. The first is to take an almost immediate veer to the right and there are some boondock camping sites kind of between the piles of Highway material and the Bend Aero Modelers airport that are difficult to see in map satellite images and have some shade. The second is if you go straight and continue about 2/3 of a mile there will be a dirt road to your right. You can see it in the Satellite View of Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc. but you need to zoom way in. GPS for our campsite was 43.940050, -121.010189 a few miles up the dirt road.

We followed the road up the hill to the GPS coordinates I listed above. I was towing a light, fully self contained 19' Escape fiberglass trailer with my Ford F150 4x4 and it was a bit treacherous in a few places, mostly because we don't have a lift kit installed for the trailer, but we cleared everything okay. This hill is steeper than it looks on google maps and I did use 4x4 low for a bit.

I would not take a passenger car more than mile or so down the dirt road. There are only two places to turn around before you start heading up the hill where 4-Wheel Drive would be desirable. The last spot to turn around is a fork to a dirt road that goes back around the east end of the Aero Club runway. I suspect you can take a passenger car and follow the dirt road around the end of the airport runway, and back to the main highway, but I did not drive on that part so I don't know for sure.
If you keep going up the hill the road forks. To the right is one more camping spot, but I would not go much farther than that. Going to the left at the fork you will find several more suitable campsites, and quite frankly I wished we had driven up there to one of those.

It was darned hot the weekend we were there and it was cold at night (very cold one of the nights) so be prepared for the huge swing in temps, at least in summer. There is no way I would try going up the hill in the winter. If it snowed you would be stuck there for sure.

The only problem we had - and this is one of those "it could only happen to me" kind of stories, is that one night around 1:00AM a group of good old boys drove their Jeep up the hill past us to the campsite about 1/2 mile away where I wished we had setup (left of the fork in the road) and promptly turned on their car headlights (yep aimed right at our camp and my telescope) and proceeded to build a bonfire and finish off a six pack or two. So a long trip to a good dark sky only to be stymied one night by car headlights out in the middle of nowhere. At least they were gone by sunrise and kept to themselves and were quiet.

Slight ding on the rating for site quality (it is a mixed use area, e.g. gravel mining) and noise (highway and some noise from the gravel pit during the day).

Staff is nice, but I won't stay again at least until they finish the dedicated truck/rv parking lot in late 2024. They have you parking at the far end of the lot near the bus stop (never saw a bus and we arrived at 4pm). Had homeless people walking through the far end of the lot at all hours, people talking outside, again at all hours, and cars streaming through the end of the parking lot at all hours. Not sure why the cars kept coming around, there is nothing over that side of the lot. At one point a very old, very Jeffrey Dahmer looking RV was parked nearby but they left, maybe security told them to leave, not sure. Later two other fairly new RVs showed up and stayed the night.

The staff is nice and the restaurant is actually decent, but the casino does nothing to control smoke so for non-smokers it is rather hard to be there. We have been in a lot of casinos and stayed in many casino parking lots and this was the scariest. Even the clientele inside had a lot more "desperate gamblers" (my term for folks with little money, chain smoking, and generally looking disheveled) and spend most of it on slots hoping for a big payout) there than I normally see at casinos.