roadtripper801769

We stayed over the Thanksgiving weekend and there wasn't a lot of people in the park which made for a very pleasant experience. Our site was right next to the Cumberland river and we hear owls and blue herons. There is a fish hatchery on the grounds that feed a trout stream. The only negative we would have is the road into the campground. It's not for faint at heart. It's very curvy and hilly. It's a great driving road if I was in my GTI, but not so great in a large vehicle towing the camper.

Cell phone coverage was very good. We had 2-3 bars, but the latency was very good and I was getting around 20-50 mbps download on both my phone and tablet.

For us, the drive was good. It only took us an hour to get there and the park is right next to the road going along the St. Clair River, which is one of the reasons for my poor rating. The road is busy and lot of loud trucks drove on it most of the day. The campground itself doesn’t have very many trees, which is a big negative for me. I like having a well shaded site. The site are small and with today’s huge campers being the norm, the campground felt very cramped after it filled up. It was nice to watch the freighters go by on the river and I’m assuming most of people there were there to do just that. Many of the campers had their chairs arrange to watch the boats go by.

The cell service was very crappy and our devices keep connecting with the Canadian cell providers, which have a much better signal. Make sure you have roaming data turned or you could end up with a large cell phone bill.

I've never heard of this campground when I came across on Recreation.gov looking for any openings since all of our state parks were booked this summer. We had a wonderful experience, outside of a noisy neighbor causing issues one night. The site was also very roomy and had lots of hardwood and pine tress surrounding it. The campground is actually called Lake Michigan at Manistee and right next to the Nordhouse Wilderness Area. There is a wonderful sandy beach, a short walk from our site, that wasn't very busy. I was able to spend a some time on the beach in silence just listing to the waves crash. There is also a very nice hiking trail that is part of the wilderness area that we did, but we only did have of the trail. The trailhead for the trail was at the beach.

There are no hook-ups, but there is an asphalt pad that comes off the road in an angle that would make it easy to back a camper into the site. We camp in a tent for this weekend, but we're definitely planning on going back once we get our camper, even without the hook-ups. The campground had 4 loops with 25 sites in each loop. The loop we were on had 1 bathroom with flush toilets, but no showers. That would be the only knock on the campground, no showers. There were a couple of water spickets.