Best Dog-Friendly Camping near Ponchatoula, LA

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.

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.