Lordsburg KOA

Clean, secure spot just off the Interstate. You go through a sketchy part of town, however, the KOA is secure and quiet. Decent WiFi- just a clean stopover on our way to White Sands.

For what is important to me, I'll give it 5 stars. Not new or fancy but we'll kept. Clean, level, easy access, large sites, affordable, relative quiet even though I-20 nearby. Friendly management, well stocked office/ store. Mc Donald's, Dollar Store, Gas, grocery nearby. Tour nearby Shakespeare ghost town of you have time. I'll be back...

It’s a basic gravel lot with full hookups, two small dog runs and a basic old school playground. They offer dinner and breakfast on site, but I didn’t partake. The only negative was that the office is only open 8-9am and 1-8pm, so we couldn’t fill up our propane on the way out at 10am. Not a big deal - I’d stay here again without hesitation.

Nice staff. Utilities worked fine though the water pressure seemed a little low. Plenty of spots available in June 2022. Wi-Fi was fast, plenty good for streaming TV. Didn't test the cable. Only antenna channel was PBS. Pool was a tad cold but was still nice. Strong T-Mobile 5G, but it was unusably slow. Would stay again if needed.

We didn’t see 70’ spots but plenty of room for our 40’ RV with a towed car.
Pretty quiet area, yes a bit sketchy neighborhood to get there. No bugs at all
No one available to do propane on way out that would be my only problem.
We’d come back.

This was our second overnight stay at the campground: the first time was back in early 2020 before I started writing reviews. The first time we visited, we arrived after the check-in time but has to wait parked at the entrance until someone returned to the office at 1pm. This time, remembering that, we arrived just after 1pm. The office was still unoccupied, but they’d posted a list of all incoming reservations with the site numbers included, so we were able to drive to our site and setup, returning to the office later to officially check in.

The entire surface of the campground is gravel. On this visit we stayed in site 12, one of the longer pull-through sites with full hookups in the back row. There is a decent amount of space between sites, with enough room to park our truck alongside the RV on the passenger side behind the picnic table. Our site was level and the hookups were in a normal spot. Most sites have at least one adjacent tree, but most of the trees are too young to provide any shade to taller RVs.

The campground has the typical set of KOA amenities: the office has a small convenience store, there are bathroom and laundry facilities within the office building and a pool next door. Near the entrance to the campground is a small fenced-in playground, the dump station, a large outdoor patio space with a small pavilion containing a covered grill and sink, and a single basketball hoop. The propane refill station is located along the exit road, but a sign in the office said they were not selling propane that day.

There are two small fenced-in, single-gate dog parks, one along the wall behind our row of pull-through sites, and another along the wall at the back of the campground. Both runs have dirt surfaces, a few plants, and an in-ground container with dog toys, which was a nice touch. There are dog poop bins located just outside each dog run, but there are also a few dumpsters and trash cans throughout the park, along with two trash cans that are labeled for aluminum can recycling.

In terms of cell service, the best speed I got on my Verizon Jetpack with MIMO antenna was 48Mbps down and 32 up, and we had no trouble streaming video. The best speed I got on my AT&T smartphone was 41Mbps down and 12 up.

During our first visit, we ate at the nearby sit-down restaurant Kranberry’s: decent food, but nothing to write home about.

We would stay here again if we were in the area.

Lordsburg, now slowly dying, was once quite the place: NM's first airport, one of Lindbergh's stops on his return west from his Atlantic crossing, the origin of NM's state song, living with claimed memories of Billy the Kid and a key rail stop. Now it's slowly drying up. Similarly, KOA's grand story or profit and fun, pitched to franchisee prospects of the 80's and 90's, has faded similarly away here. In its place is a site that looks like a 60's drive-in movie 'theater' without the humps. The trees are barren in winter, hoping for a thunderstorm each day of the long summer. Still, this place appears to keep pumping along because those of us driving those l-o-n-g stretches on I-10 run out of daylight and/or energy and want to retreat for the night. I guess that's a good thing for both them and us RV'ers...but I chalk it up as another typical 'meh' KOA experience. The confirmation email talk of how excited the hosts are to have us join them. The only excitement I saw were the dogs jumping out of their vehicles to relieve themselves after the long drives.

Our hook-ups worked, we had a hell of a time finding the place, the 'host' put in his 3 afternoon hours in case you needed the wifi password (didn't work for us), and off we went the next morning. A box checked on the itinerary but otherwise unenriched. Good luck to you, Lordsburg.

we were headed to Boondock at Granite Gap for some wild camping in New Mexico. Headed west from El Paso, I figured we could get gas in Columbus along NM 9, and as usual, I was right.

87¢ worth of gas. The little Fina station sold us the last 1/3 of a gallon they had. It was 90 miles to Animas, the attendant told me, "but you'll be lucky to make it there before they close," a fellow gas purchaser joked, looking at our slow moving VW Bus.

So we detoured north to Deming and had lunch.

As the Interstate opened up before us, the wind went howling heavier and heavier, and the rain came in waves from the sky. There it was, the KOA sign.

I gave in. Our electrical was shot and needed repaired. It was freezing cold.

"Are you sure you want a tent site?" She asked, an Asian woman running the KOA. "It's only two dollars more for a Kabin."

It was $30 more actually, but we went for it. An older couple in a Eurovan took our tent spot and we got cozy in a cabin.

The bathroom was painted bright yellow, brand new coat and right over any insects or snots wiped on the walls. The game room was just a broken pool table. The showers were hot. Were we interested, we could have walked to town, which was small but not dead.

I say it every time, and break my own promise, that I'll never stay at a KOA again. But I will. Hopefully not this one.

The curse of New Mexico strikes us again.

Nice park just off the interstate. Fairly level sites, just had to raise the front a little bit. I needed extensions for both electrical and water. I think a little pricey, but nice safe place.

Easy in and out, the most flat site we've ever had! Nice hard-packed gravel and dead nuts level. A little bit of highway noise and some trains rolled through in the morning. We spent one night passing through the area, perfect for what we needed. Site was long enough for our 40 foot MH and tow so we didn't have to unhook. Sites are pretty close together and no privacy in-between if you're planning a longer stay. Friendly reservation and check-in process, clean and tidy place. Good Verizon cell signal.