Best RV Parks & Resorts near Mascoutah, IL

I wanted to escape the house and go camping while on the work from home order (Covid-19 happening at the time of this review), so I headed to a very local park and campground to pitch my tent. I've been to 370 Lakeside Park many times to walk around the huge lake and to hear concerts in the summer, but I had never camped there. Still haven't. I'll explain. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, they were not so keen on having tent campers. But they were very nice and gave me the general lowdown on this "in the city" campground. Since they opened the campground, most of their campers have been RV owners, and so it is really designed for the RV camper. There is a small primitive section for group tent camping, but the majority of the sites are full hookups for RVs. Some sites are pull through and some are back in. All have picnic tables and fire pits. The park has planted some trees, but they are really just saplings, so there is no shade yet. There is a nice bathhouse with free showers for the campers and pay laundry. If you are lucky, you can get a site close to the water, but it means the walking trail is right next to your unit. Trade offs, I suppose. One couple I talked to was camping long term (I think they are permanent RV'ers) and they got a free membership to the St Peter's RecPlex recreation center with their long term spot (they said something about having to book a least a month out to get this perk). One of the downsides to this location is that it is prone to flooding. It was out of commission for most of the summer of 2019 as the entire area was flooded. But the City of St Peters did a great job getting this place back to usable with new sod, a new bathhouse, and some general sprucing up. The lake is great to walk around, about a 3 mile walk or bike on a paved trail. You can see all kinds of wildlife in and around the lake- deer, bald eagles, pelicans, ducks, snakes. In the summers they have live music in the large pavilion, and you can rent kayaks and other small boats to take out on the lake as well as bikes to ride around on. The office told me that they have 24 hour on site security also. If I really wanted to tent camp, I could rent a section of the group camping area, but $30 seemed pricey for just me, and it was very soggy to boot. Or I  could rent an RV spot, but $45 was silly when I don' t need hookups.

Pros: For this to be such a small RV park (smallest we’ve stayed at so far) the sites are very spacious! The wi-fi was surprisingly good enough that my wife and I could both work off of it and even stream shows on the Roku the whole week, except for our last day for some strange reason. Of course, with it being close to St. Louis we had great phone service, full bars of 5G with Verizon, and there were a lot of stores, restaurants, gas stations, etc right nearby.

Cons: There wasn’t any signage telling us where to park to check in or any of that which was more confusing because there’s a separate entrance for the office than there is for the actual park so you have to park on the park side and walk over to the office side. The park seems to be catered to full time/seasonal campers there so there’s not a lot of “amenities” like you’d normally have at an RV park (no bathrooms/showers, pool, fire ring, etc). And of course it’s not necessarily a “pretty” RV park but it’s not really ugly either, just somewhere in the middle.

Pro/con: I had to make a separate category for this because it was a pro and con. The con is: While we were there they had a record rainfall amount and the park apparently already has flooding issues so it was flooding pretty bad but also our RV was right next to a creek that had risen really high and was in danger of flooding our site completely and maybe even into our RV (worst case scenario of course). The pro is: The staff came out while this was happening to warn us of the potential flooding and offered to let us move to another site away from the creek if we needed to. Luckily, as they were discussing with us the rain had quite and the flooding was going down so we didn’t have to take any action but it was very nice that they came out to check on us and try to give us a safe place to move to.

Overall: As I’ve mentioned this is a small park that’s not anything overly special but it’s an affordable place that has very spacious full hook up sites and the staff are clearly very helpful and concerned about their guests safety. Good if you’re passing through or spending the week in the St. Louis area and just need a nice quiet place to stay.

There are few campgrounds with full hook-ups in the Edwardsville, IL area, so we were pleased to find this one. Yes, trains pass 2 blocks away several times nightly, but after the first night you won't notice. During modified car racing season, Friday nights are roaring loud from the racetrack nearby. This last stay in September 2020, we were surprised to see many full spots with residents living full time there. The playground and bounce pad and store were closed due to coronavirus, but the bathrooms and showers were open. Laundry is by appt. only. Not fancy, not quiet, but clean and safe. A bit pricey for the area, but as I said, not many choices there.