Best Dog-Friendly Camping near Belle Chasse, LA

With less than 50 spaces, this beautiful little park, just 4 miles from beautiful white sand beaches, is tucked away from the roads and surrounded by a wonderful mixed forest of hardwood and pines. Walking trails are meticulously maintained and provide a wide variety of walking choices throughout this park. There is a pond surrounded by the trails filled with lily pads that was starting to bloom as we left a week ago. There is even a“contemplation bench” on the edge of the pond perfect for sitting and just taking in the beauty of the surroundings. 

The RV spaces are of different sizes to accommodate different sized rigs but all are well spaced, extremely level, and very well maintained. Each space has their own fire ring and picnic table. All of the full hookup utilities are in an excellent state of repair and maintenance. Roads are well maintained and ruts or pot holes are quickly filled with gravel and graded when they appear. 

Aesthetics are important to this park. From the moment you drive in, you are greeted by the very attractive office facility which has a small store of RV essentials and a good selection of shirts and hats sporting the parks’ logo. 

Amenities: Where to start- as I said with regards to the facilities, all of the amenities are meticulously maintained. The park has well priced onsite propane refills. You simply drop off your tank and it is returned to you at your site filled promptly. The laundry and bath facilities are spotless and a pleasure to use. The clubhouse with both indoor and outdoor facilities is amazing! The covered outdoor seating area has a great welcoming fireplace and wonderful ambiance that just feels like home to all who enter. The pool is very nice with wonderful deck seating, lots of shade umbrellas and very nicely landscaped. The enclosed dog park is a great place to give your pups their off-leash time as well. It’s well grassed and maintained and provides a safe and secure place to spend time with your dog(s) any time of day. The WiFi is adequate and is constantly being evaluated for improvements. Just this last year, fiber optic internet was brought into the park and the owners plan to upgrade the service even more this next year. I forgot to mention, you can have your mail forwarded here and they deliver it to your site daily! We just can’t say enough about our experience here. 

Experience: Bay Hide Away has the look and feel of a boutique B&B only for RVs. Randy and Lea, the park owners and seasoned RVrs, go above and beyond to make a stay there a true experience. A wide range of activities for nearly all interests are provided from game nights, periodic“steak dinners”, pot lucks, craft sessions, weekly Happy Hours, holiday parties and dinners, and frequent tours of the local area for nearly every taste and interest. 

Signature experiences such as“We meet to eat” at select local restaurants, weekly men’s breakfasts and women’s lunches provide a great way to get to know your neighbors. It’s a rare night that you don’t see several folks gathered around fire pits enjoying this place and sharing with others. Randy and Lea go above and beyond to help guests with any maintenance activities that may be required as well. Randy and Lea are seen daily in their golf cart in the late afternoon and evenings making the rounds to nearly every site sharing news and laughter with the guests that they all know by name. It just doesn’t get any more personal than this. Randy and Lea have made our stay here the standard to which our stay at other RV parks will be held. 

Afterthought: COVID-19 was a sobering experience to all of us. Randy and Lea acted quickly and responsibly to shut down activities, manage access to the shower/laundry facilities and to set a standard for social distancing within the park. All the while still checking up on their guests on a daily basis. They quickly managed reservation changes to accommodate“sheltering in place” for those that needed that support. Thank you again Randy and Lea for this most wonderful experience.

We planned on hanging out here for around a week but ended up leaving after a couple of hours. There were a bunch of signs posted saying no pets and some other campers told us that they are pretty strict about it. That was enough for us to find somewhere else cause we can’t relax looking over our shoulder worrying about having our dog out. I don’t want to talk down on this place because we didn’t stay there but I will say I wasn’t a huge fan of the vibe in general either. It didn’t feel like a place I could relax but I will say I could have seen myself staying a night or two if I had to.

This park typifies “RV Resort” with multiple swimming pools(with swim up bars), café, lazy river, pool cabanas, putt putt golf, pickelball/basketball courts, a fitness center, game room, club house, amphitheater(with live entertainment), playground, off-leash dog park, gift shop, water craft rental, golf cart rental, and a water-based obstacle course(think Ninja Warrior type course). Be aware, some of these amenities have costs associated with them. For example, a cabana by the pool costs $85/day and water attractions are $25/day! We stayed the month of March and the park was about half full during the week with seasonal campers but filled to capacity over the weekends. 

All sites are 30/50 amp, full hook-up, with wifi and cable. There are pull-thru and back-in sites. Sites, roads, and patios are paved and level and come with a picnic table and fire pit. There are two and three-rig “buddy sites” which are great for camping with friends. Roads are wide and sites are angled for easy in and out. Each site has a picnic table and fire pit. There are two site types - “standard” and“premium” with the difference being the length of the patio and a $10/night higher price tag. Weekly, monthly, and seasonal rates are available and heavily discounted and there are discounts for Good Sam, senior citizen, and military. Our monthly rate reduced the nightly cost from $60 to $22. 

Reunion Lake has very easy and quick access to I-12 between Baton Rouge and Covington. New Orleans is about an hour’s drive away but the smaller towns of Ponchatoula and Hammond are ten minutes away. There is a Sonic and Exxon just outside the gate with walking distance and a grocery store is about three miles away. 

Although this is a nice park with lots of amenities this was not really a good fit for us and is crazy with kids on the weekends. We were a little miffed that we were assigned a campsite that management knew did not have working cable. As I was fiddling with the cable(for a couple of hours) other campers came by to tell us that cable had not worked in that site for a long time and management knew that. We were glad the manager agreed to move(and upgrade us to a premium site) but it two days after we checked in and were all set up. Our fire pit(and many others in the park) had trash in it. We never saw anyone clean out fire pits the entire month we were there. The weekend campers near us turned out to be pretty obnoxious with loud karaoke and radios playing all day even when they were not outside. On their behalf, they did turn the music down by quiet hours but it was so loud during the day that we didn’t want to sit outside. There were pieces of trash scattered throughout the park that never got picked up even as we watched staff drive by them every day. Small children were left unsupervised in the lazy river and did not abide by the parks rule to remain in tubes. Children were unsupervised on the basketball/pickleball courts and used the golf putter to hit rocks in the horseshoe pits. One bathhouse we went in was in need of some serious cleaning. 

This park has a lot of great amenities if that is what you are looking for. It fills up with weekend campers with lots of kids and barking dogs on weekends so there is not much peace and quiet. While it was a decent place to stay during the week, it got pretty crazy on the weekends.

This is a review for BUCCANEER STATE PARK Waveland Mississippi where we stay during  January 2023

Be sure to travel US 90 to Lake Shore Drive to avoid RR track bottom out. 

Lake Shore Drive deadheads into South Beach Drive.

PROS 

Site 109 level 

Site 109 shady 

Treasure Cove toilet/shower facility was heated and clean with ample TP 

Site pedestal grill 

Park roadways easily navigable 

Trash dumpster at campground loop entrance, which was walkable 

T-MOBILE 2-3 bars 

CONS 

Never saw park ranger drive thru campground in 3 days 

Never found a camp host nor were there any marked in campground map

LOTS of noise! Railroad Avenue runs right behind Treasure Cove campground which is heavily traveled Railroad track behind park has 2-3 trains passing by each night 

No privacy from neighboring campsites 

Non moveable concrete & wooden picnic table on concrete slab 

Leash rules ignored by pet owners 

No overnight security gate closure 

Park laundromat had machines out of service 

No park WiFi