Salome KOA

When we arrived the front desk clerk was friendly. I used our RPI membership to camp here. I was charged $15.00 a night. The campground is a gravel parking lot. The sites are well spaced. The campers waved to us on our walks. I'm unfamiliar with boondocking. I used this campground as a home base to explore Quartzsite during the January big tent event. A train goes by at night sometimes. The at&t service was low. The verizon service was good.

En route to a lot of Arizona destinations like Quartzsite, Phoenix and Sedona, this little KOA has a lot of repeat campers coming down south from Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The sites are gravel, with a cement slab for your chairs and tables and have full hook ups. There are plenty of sites for big rigs, but I was fortunate enough to get site 115, which is next to the Chuckwagon on one side, which is only used once a week. So I had more privacy. Nice showers and restrooms with full laundry in the clubhouse. The small pool is heated and big enough for short laps, with a hot tub nearby. These serve as a gathering place at the end of the afternoon for people to meet. I met some interesting people there. The one negative is that the internet, provided by JABBA, was very weak, even with my WiFi Ranger Booster, and the cell service was also weak, even with a booster. But I would stay here again over all the other alternatives in the area.

Park is full of 4x4’s running dirty diesel, so its super loud and stinks twice a day (when they’re heading to the desert in the AM and returning in the PM).

There is a train nearby but it’s not awful.

Monty the work camper went above and beyond to make sure we had everything we needed. The other men I interacted with weren’t so great.

There are a lot of loud barking dogs (mostly lonely— locked indoors while their humans were out al day), some small dogs weren’t always leashed and I witnessed a few close calls when they got into minor altercations with other dogs.

The laundry room was clean but something was up with their washers because I got a rash after using the laundry facilities there. The machines are expensive $2 each, 4 washers and 4 dryers), and two were broken for most of our stay.

For being a gravel lot in the middle of a dusty dirty desert, it was fairly clean. Most guests refused to wear masks in common areas, but we mostly kept to ourselves.

This place is an hour from anything. There is a nice convenience store with propane and a nasty dollar store in town. A Pilot station isn’t too far away.

The whole point of the park seems to be a stopover on I-10 or a base camp for 4-wheeling in the desert.

Sites are level but the hookups are in the rear, so we had to buy an extra water hose and an extension hose for waste from the KOA store. Conveniently inconvenient.

We weren’t going to stay here at all because when we scoped it out ahead of time, there was a camper with a confederate flag flying high. We called out the park for it, and found out the camper would be leaving the park, so we decided to reserve a month after all. There was a sign up in the common room from the manager that said “the confederate flag drama has made it to our park” and “theyre KOA corporate’s rules not mine, I just have to enforce them.” There were lots of political flags on 4x4’s, some political flags had profanity on them.

Overall, I didn’t feel safe here.

Verizon data coverage was good, Tmobile voice was fine but lousy data.

We enjoyed our short stay, Bathroom/showers were clean. We checked out the clubhouse, seemed nice but we didn’t use it. We enjoyed the game room, it had a pool table, ping pong table, and lots of games and puzzles for the kids. Pool was nice. A lot of people seem to camp here with ATV’s but the noise never bothered us. Paid about $48 a night with our Good Sam discount.

Only con is that it is out of the way, felt like it took us forever to get there after getting off the highway. And no grocery store, but they do have a dollar general.

It’s a depressing gravel parking lot with folks packed in. One camper lamented the she’s been moved 3 times in the few weeks she’s been there. Not sure why. It wasn’t full. For us it was out of the way to get there and just not the experience we were seeking.