We stayed a week at Clinton State Park’s campground at site 92 in the middle of July with our two dogs.
Pros:
The park itself is very big so the sites were pretty big which is always a big plus. Sites come with a picnic table and a fairly large fire ring which we unfortunately never got to enjoy because we were here during a heat wave (100+ almost every day).
The park is also at a lake so there’s a beach access area where you can go and swim or just sit by the very large lake. There’s also a marina and boat ramps for anyone who has a boat, which we sadly did not.
Of course, it’s important to mention this was one of the most affordable places we’ve ever stayed, granted, it was with a non sewer site but still.
Cons:
The check-in situation was not very good. We received our site number upon reservation but we didn’t receive any instructions on when and where to check-in or if anyone would even be there to check us in. We also weren’t aware we’d have to pay for a parking pass for both our RV and towed vehicle which is normally $5/day but since we were there 7 days they gave us the annual passes which came out to $50 total for both vehicles.
This one obviously most likely just has to do with the time of year we were here and it’s out of the park’s control but there were SO MANY BUGS especially at night. We hung our outside string lights like normal and, as you’ll see in the photos, they were absolutely swarmed with bugs. We’ve never seen so many bugs in one place, not even close.
We also, as mentioned above, stayed at a W/E only site in the Prairie Clover Campground and each campground only has one dump station (2 total for the whole park) and the one for ours was closed for construction, which we were not made aware of, so we had to drive a pretty good distance to take our honey pot to the only one that was open.
The bathrooms/showers were extremely hot because of no ventilation, had a lot of bugs, and the showers only give you one temperature and one pressure level, neither of which were great, and the lights in both are on a sensor and they went off within about 5 minutes of being in there and no matter how much you motioned it wouldn’t come back on so you’re stuck showering in the dark.
Lastly, our Verizon service wasn’t very good, only about 2 bars of LTE. We both work full time remotely so this was concerning but luckily with our jet pack connected to an antenna we were able to get around 3 bars of LTE which was enough for us to work off of.
Overall:
This is a nice, affordable state park/campground overall, not exactly the prettiest but it’s big and offers big sites and a large lake you can enjoy. It would have been much more enjoyable to stay during a cooler time of the year when there wasn’t so many bugs and on a site that had sewer (a non sewer site was our choice to be fair) so you didn’t have to worry about the dump station situation. Also not having wi-fi or great phone service was inconvenient but we had enough to make it work. We don’t plan to spend a whole lot of time in Kansas but if we came back through anytime that’s not spring or summer we’d definitely consider staying here again.
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