Whether you're an RVer or tent camper, Mystic, CT is a great place to post up for the weekend—or longer. Mystic is a great camping destination for everyone. There are tons of nearby hikes, adventurous activities, and sights to see. You're sure to find the perfect campground for your Mystic camping trip.
$5 / night
"Selden Neck State Park is an island in the Connecticut River with no roads or development other than 4 campsites. You have to kayak or boat in."
$5 / night
"There's a few sites close to each other, so it is nice to go with enough people to occupy them all at once to keep it personal. You can swim and fish and relax all day!"
"Good tent platforms, picnic tables and outhouse. CT river within view. Good site"
$49 - $89 / night
"I would like to welcome your host, Mary, to our platform. There are 2 lodging options to choose from. Pets welcome! Book your stay today and come back here to leave them some love."
$46 - $50 / night
LegendI've never camped in Rhode Island, so I was curious to see what a state park campground had to offer. Rates are reasonable for state residents, but quite high if you are out-of-state, given the amenities. There are no hookups, but dump stations are available. Bathrooms have flush toilets and coin-operated showers. There's a small beach at the pond, a boat ramp, and proximity to wildlife refuges and the ocean. It's a HUGE campground, with 700 sites and 20 cabins. Canoes are available to rent.
There's a nice playground, a camp store, and a naturalists cabin. Trails are available for hiking and biking. The beach is sandy and there's a small parking lot there, but I suspect most people walk to it. No alcohol allowed.
I didn't see more than a handful of level sites, with varying degrees of slope, but many are quite large. If you have an RV, plan to level; if you have a tent, be sure to bring good mattresses to protect you from the roots and rocks and orient your head to the uphill side. Most of the sites have some degree of visual separation from their neighbors, but there are places where it's hard to tell where one site ends and the next one starts. Site have fire rings and picnic tables, but if you plan to cook over the fire, bring your own grate or plan to use sticks and/or aluminum foil.
If you don't have a tent, consider reserving one of their rustic cabins. These offer two sets of bunks (no mattresses) and a small porch with a picnic table and fire ring outside. Some are located along the pond.
3-4 bar cell phone coverage. No road traffic. East Beach is nearby, but parking fills early.
ScoutLoud campers in large groups.
Rules regarding quiet hours, no generators, number of tents per site and late arrival and setups were not enforced.
People next to us crammed 8 tents on 3 sites. I counted a group of at least 20.
There is no privacy, people were constantly walking through our site and stepping over our tent guy lines.
People partied until 2:00am and woke up at 5:30am shining headlights and idling cars.
Bathrooms were dirty, sites boundaries not marked and crammed together. No shade.
Beautiful location, rangers were nice.
RV folks were surly, seemed like a lot of them stay there for the entire season. One said hi, the rest stared when we drove by.
We booked and paid for two nights and left first thing after just one night.
LegendWe stayed at Mystic KOA in North Stonington, Connecticut, to be tourists in Mystic. Spoiler alert… we had a great stay!
This campground is just 15-minutes from Mystic and about an hour’s drive to Newport, Rhode Island. It’s just a few minutes from I-95 and so close to Mystic Aquarium, downtown Mystic, Mystic Seaport, and all the local spots.
It’s a well-maintained campground with 2 pools(though the larger one was closed for maintenance during our stay), lots of play areas and daily activities for little ones, and a cool“pub truck” for adult drinks. Our site(#408) was about 85’ long with plenty of room for our 45’ motorhome and toad(and then some!). It was level and gravel with a nice fire ring and picnic table. The hookups worked fine with 50-amp electric and decent water pressure. Cable TV had nearly 50-channels, but the wi-fi didn’t quite reach our part of the park.
Due to a family issue, we needed to leave about a day-and-a-half early. We called the office as a courtesy to let them know as we were pulling out and received a partial credit for a night’s stay on our credit card. Didn’t even ask, they just did it. Thanks Mystic KOA!
We’ll definitely be back. This is a great place to stay when visiting the coastal Connecticut/Rhode Island area.
ScoutI have been camping at Rocky Neck State Park for decades, both tent camping, and now In a 30' camper. Located right off I95 ( which you can hear at times), the park is convenient to all the major interstates and state roads. If you can, stay away from the front gates during the typical peak arrival / departure times. Traffic jams occur, partly because you're also in-line with the car loads of beach goers. The beach and beach parking lots fill to capacity. Week ends are the worst.
The campgrounds are located within internal loops. Most sites are quite level. Park-like settings surrounding a large lawn. Bathhouses are being rehabbed, deemed adequate; can be seedy towards the end of the season. Park is routinely patrolled by State Conservation Officers who will put you out if needed. CT State Police and local officers also patrol. Camp roads are paved, and lots and lots of kids spend time riding bikes, coloring with chalk, skateboarding, roller blading.
No electrical hook-ups; potable water spigots located within the camping circles. Generators allowed, but there are quiet hours. Dump upon exit; its up top by the entrance booths.
There is a "tent-only area" which is nice and abuts a paved road for campers to walk / bike to the beach. Use this. Stay off the main road to the beach if you can. The speed limit is enforced, but sporadically. The fines are very stiff (you receive a State traffic ticket from the Officer).
This beach road leads you to a wonderful overlook where lots of people take their kids crabbing for Blueshells. There are size regulations so be careful. The regs are posted. Bring some raw chicken wings and kite string and have some fun. You can also follow the signs that will lead you to nature walks. Amazing.
During inclement weather some campers leave the park. We always recommend taking a right out of the park onto east bound Route 156. Follow into downtown Niantic for restaurants, an Irish pub, or a movie. Nice village area, and pedestrian friendly.
Rocky Neck is a very nice park, and if I had to list one complaint, it is that the State is in a financial tight-spot, and has been cutting services and personnel. Entrance booths go unmanned and that leads to traffic jams that extend out and onto the main road. Very , very messy. Life guard towers at the beach are empty at times. Bath houses can be filthy.
All things considered, I would recommend this park..
GuideCamped here on a Friday night in Site 16, yet another campground recommended in“Best Tent Camping: New England.” Overall I was not impressed. The campsites are right next to each other and are marked with posts. The sites are so close that the posts are marked with the site number on both sides which tells me that there has been confusion in the past.
The sites along the creek mostly have worn paths to walk to it but it’s nothing impressive and I wouldn’t want to eat fish that came out of it. Each site has a picnic table and fire ring, some have the kind where the top flips over and others have the moveable grate that goes up and down. There is a large dumpster in the campground and several porta-potties. The old outhouses have been permanently closed and locked shut. My campsite had a lot of trash in it, old tent stakes, plastic bottle caps, plastic fork, broken glass, etc. Not good.
Some of the people there were camping in a group and were blasting music. I didn’t see a single park ranger the entire night so I’m not sure how often they police it. Someone in a pickup truck came into the campground, did a u-turn, and sped out at 30 mph which was really annoying and unsafe.
Across the street from the campground is a trail to Chapman Falls, which will take less than 10 minutes to hike to, but it’s a pretty waterfall despite all the foam and garbage around it.
This is a pretty basic campground and is nothing special. Out of all the sites I think 22 looked the best, it is more isolated and you can hear the waterfalls from it, which would be relaxing. The downside is that it’s right next to the entrance and road so you’ll get car headlights at night.
I woke in the morning to a gray sky and hundreds of birds singing– it was my favorite part of the trip. I delayed getting up to enjoy the moment. I also didn’t see any ticks but I’m sure there are plenty based on other reviews.
I’ve always thought that if states were condiments Connecticut would be mayonnaise– relatively unremarkable and bland. This campground fits that description perfectly.
TravelerSuper large sites, store is adequately stocked, nice lake/pond. I came here because of the location. Super close to the beach. This is a state park, no alcohol is allowed, quiet time strictly enforced. Nice family campground. No hookups.
LegendGeneral: HUGE state park with over 700 sites. It does not fully open for the season until May 1 and when we were there in mid-April, only two sections, Fish Camp and Mills Camp were open. The Ranger station is staffed 24 hours a day, with a ranger on site until 11 pm. You need to show your pass to get inside the gate leading to the campsites. There are no hookups in any site (as far as I could tell). Sites are designated for tents, small trailers, large trailers, and RVs. As with other RI state parks, non-residents pay double the price of residents which kind of ticks me off (I don't mind a nominal upcharge but double is excessive IMO).
Site Quality: The site numbers throughout the park are painted on rocks but the sites themselves are not very clearly defined. There is no designated camping pad. Our site (114) had a water view but was not level. It was large enough for us to park horizontally and make it work for one night. Some sites had excessive roots and also were not level. Some picnic tables have been replaced with new ones, but others badly need it.
Bath/Shower house: The one in Fish Camp was adequate and clean. There is hot water, but you need to run it for a while before you get any. There was no garbage receptacle, and the toilet paper is so thin, that you can see through it. Showers are $.75 to get it started for the first three minutes. After that, the amount per minute increases to $1, $1.25, $1.50, and so forth. Machines take up to 22 quarters. There is a change machine at the Ranger Station. I did not use the shower so I cannot comment on how well they work.
Activities/Amenities: There is a camp store that offers wood, ice, coffee, basic groceries, propane, and canoe rentals. It was open with limited hours during our stay. Fishing, boating, swimming - all in season. Even though the park was only about 10% occupied, there was a strong Ranger presence. He circled our small loop three times just before check-out time and wanted to make sure we were leaving not a minute past the designated time.
This was just an overnight stay for us in a convenient location but there is no way I would stay at the height of the season!
TravelerBurlingame is a HUGE state park campground with over 700 sites. The location is fantastic, but with this many sites (so, with this many people), there are bound to be pros and cons.
Pros:
Lovely location - it's in the middle of the woods, has a pond, has pond swimming. It's just minutes to the ocean by car. Hiking and biking for miles.
Camp store - well stocked.
Price - dirt cheap if you are a RI resident, but pricey if you aren't.
Spacious - even with all those sites, there's plenty of room between sites and tons of open space for kids to run around, fly a kite, play tag, hide and seek.
Real camping atmosphere - fire rings at each site, wooded sites (and open grass sites if you like that better). Wildlife (listening to the several types of owls is a favorite pastime at night). While RVs are welcome (and we have tent and trailer camped here), this is NOT an RV resort. No hook-ups.
Cons:
No hook-ups, lol. This is a con in the heat of the summer if you want/need AC.
Bath houses - are usually pretty filthy, and that's because there are too many people per bath house, and people are gross.
Noise / Parties / Drunks - again, too many sites means too many people and nowhere near enough park staff. On the weekends people can get out of hand with the partying and it's not uncommon to have to listen to noise late into the night. Do not come on a holiday weekend, it's packed.
Overall, if you are a camper's camper, this is a great place. Close to CT so a day trip to Mystic is easy, close to several gorgeous beaches, close to great restaurants, ice cream, and shopping. Swim in the pond. Fish in the pond (catch and release). Bike. Hike. Hammock. Avoid holiday weekends and the heat of August if you can. Be prepared for dirty restrooms and come armed with hand soap (they no longer provide any), paper towels, and Clorox wipes.
ScoutGreat off the beaten path place to camp. Sites are large but close together. Each contain a rock built fire ring. There are toilets but no showers. Good parking for camper but limited for guests. Reservations are required in advance. Stones throw to beach/pond area
Tent camping near Mystic, Connecticut offers a blend of natural beauty and outdoor adventure, perfect for those looking to escape into the great outdoors.
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