Countryside RV Park

We stayed a week at Countryside RV in February 2017 and really enjoyed it. The owners, Mike and Carol, were on-site and available almost all the time. When we checked in, it was dark and the front desk folks came by our site (#36) with a flashlight to make sure our hookups worked without a glitch.

The park backs up to the local golf course and many of the park residents golfed and used golf carts to get around. Golf cart storage is available at the park.

Countryside has an indoor pool and spa/hot tub area. Since it is inside, the pool water stays clean and cool. The spa is heated between 4 and 9 p.m. each day. The pool house has large garage doors on two sides allowing in sunlight during the day and star gazing from the hot tub at night.

My favorite part of our stay at the park was hanging with the friendly folks staying there, mostly winter Texans. We happened to be there after Mardi Gras and got to participate in the Fat Tuesday Golf Cart parade – which had a margarita float. It was a great time and the memories will be with us for a long time.

One negative is the location of the park. It abuts highway 281 so there can be a quite a bit of road noise based site location. Ours site was right next to the feeder road so we had to keep the RV windows closed to deal with road noise from the big-truck traffic. If possible, select a site towards the back of the park, near the golf course or the pool house.

Also a negative was the free Wi-Fi which is limited to 400 MB per day. Our Wi-Fi worked for several days on a Windows laptop and iPad and then stopped working completely on the laptop. We had to use our personal hot spot for most of our stay for a consistent internet connection.

We stumbled into Falfurrias in need of a fuel pump. With our sites set on the Gulf Coast but the local auto parts store and FedEx stating we'd need to wait a day, to Campendium we turned.

Hobbling our way to Countryside RV park our first realization was that, given the proximity to town and the freeway, this was not exactly "the country", but for our purposes it would work quite well.

WiFi, Golf, Pull Throughs, the sign read.

We were greeted by the lovely owner and chatted for a minute about her and our time in Mexico. She gave a back-in spot abutting the golf course, between a couple of travel trailers which I suppose would've been a bit tight had we not been a little VW Bus ourselves. Given our minute nature, though, it was decently spacious and having no one behind us but the occasional passing golfers provided a little privacy.

Our kids wanted to get straight to playing that game where you toss two balls joined by a string onto a sort of mini fence. I say by an unlit fire pit–county burn ban and all–watching them. Occasionally someone would appear from their fifth wheel to let their dog pee, or the park's workampers would scoot by on their own little golf carts. Otherwise, nothing but the faint sound of passing traffic broke the peace and quiet.

I asked my cell phone for various accounts of the day's passing, and though AT&T rang through with only two bars of LTE, it didn't prevent me from watching a few Henry Youngman videos on YouTube.

I looked back to that big sign out front. Golf, yes, pull throughs, check, though not our particular spot. WiFi? Paid only at this point, $6 for a 1GB day pass.

And so imagined the lovely indoor pool, the single, clean bathroom with hot showers, and the equally clean laundry room sat daily wondering why they'd been excluded from that big sign in favor of "WiFi"...

As RV parks go, this is a good one, I thought. Still, something about that WiFi claim on the sign bothered me as I sat working on our engine readying us to leave the place. Something another sign says is prohibited, mind you, yet the owners and workampers said nothing of it, which I appreciated.

As to the single bathroom, I don't believe anyone else in the park ever used it, so it felt quite personal. Same with the pool.

I walked to town, a 3 mile round trip scoot, on two occasions. Blistering rain and wind broke up the hot days, of which we spent two here.

Aside from muffled highway traffic, this place was quiet like a kitten with no voicebox wearing a space mask in a noise cancelling room. If the occasional friendly workamper / owner’s golf cart didn’t whiz by every hour or so I may have thought that time itself had stood still. Perhaps it did, such are the mysteries of life.

As the days would unravel into nights, I'd think still back on that signage out front. "WiFi". Which there is, but you have to pay for it, there was no way to even get the 400mb mentioned in the previous review for free. To the sign’s testament, it does not say “Free WiFi”, but as Henny Youngman says, “Take my WiFi…please!” I think more places with the name Countryside that are actually adjacent to a freeway which abuts a town should at least toss in the WiFi.

Return each winter for fun and fellowship. Next door to community golf course. And cards and games in clubhouse. Indoor pool and hot tub. Pull through spaces - large- if overnighting.