Best Cabin Camping near South Eliot, ME

My first time experiencing a park in the New Hampshire Park system. We went down with a group. Pawtuckaway State Park offers a variety of landscapes, with something to do and see for everyone. The park includes a large family beach on the lake. There are many opportunities for hiking, with trails leading to many special points of interest, including a mountaintop fire tower; an extensive marsh where beavers, deer, and great blue herons may be seen.

The park lines the shore of beautiful Pawtuckaway Lake.  The 192 sites are wooded and many provide views of the lake.  Each campsite has an open fire ring, picnic table, flat areas for a tent, and a parking space. The bathhouses are equipped with running water, flush toilets, and 24 hour showers.  There are no hook-ups at any of the campsites. The park also has a camp store where canoe and kayaks are available, as well as a plublic canoe and kayak launch. Five cabins are available; each sleeps six people, has electricity, and includes a fire ring and picnic table. Pets are not allowed in the campground or beach area of the park.

Old Orchard Beach is a fun, family-oriented campground located in the fun little beach town of Old Orchard Beach. Old Orchard is known for their amusement park, arcade, pier, fun downtown, and expansive beach with seven miles of room to walk. Here you can stroll along the streets listening to the melodic sounds of an arcade, buy an airbrushed t-shirt and eat pier fries and fried dough. And the best thing is there is a trolley that takes you from the campground to the beach so you don’t have to deal with parking. 

When the summer season is in full swing, there is lots to do in the campground and at the nearby Atlantic Ocean beach. There are lots of amenities in the campground like a basketball court, Wiffle ball field, horseshoes, badminton, playgrounds, arcade, swimming pools and hot tub, group bonfire, and dog park. The campground is quite large and divided into a variety of sections, some areas are all seasonal campers and others are for transients. The campground offers RV sites, cabin rentals, park model sites, and simple tent sites. We liked the sections in the back (Bear Brook and Black Forest) which are set away from the entrance and the majority of activities. We visited in the off-season but can only image the park gets pretty busy especially in the front section where the swimming pool, arcade, camp store, and other activities are located. The campground is gated which limits who can come into the park. If you want to have guests, plan on shelling out a bit of cash as it is $8/day for kids and $10 for adults and$12 for overnight guests. 

Our gravel site was perfectly level with no potholes and the roads leading to our site were easy to navigate in our 45’ motorhome. The patio was gravel and there was some grass between campsites. Our picnic table was clean and not made of old rotten wood with sagging benches. There was not much shade at our site which was fine with us because it was October when we visited and wanted the sun. We were able to pick up wifi at our site because we were close to a tower. Our Verizon phone and hotspot worked great as did the parks cable television. The campground is just one mile from Old Orchard Beach and close to Route 1 which is the main corridor leading up and down the Maine coast. 

The nearby town of Biddeford has some great restaurants(Palace Dinner, Run of the Mill Public House and Brewery, and Dunston Tab and Table). While the campground is large enough for a good long walk, we prefer to walk the wooded trails at Ferry Beach State Park. If you are looking for something for kids to do there is Funtown Splashtown which is a large water and amusement park and you can get discount tickets at the campgrounds camp store

This is an extremely large campground.  It seems that most of them on the coast of Maine are.  We didn't get a very good sight, but the person who answered the phone basically told us that when we called and it was all they had, so I can't say too much about that either (#17).  The sight was small and between the two driveways.  All of the sights seem to have rocky ground, so I recommend a sleep pad and a footprint for your tent so you don't rip the bottom.  

Now, on to the other stuff.  There is a small playground that is weathered but in decent shape.  The pool is lovely and meticulously kept.  The grounds, bathrooms and showers are spotless.  It's 50 cents for 5 minutes to take a shower (unheard of) with hot water.  There is even hot water to wash your dishes next to the bathrooms.

They sell ice, wood ($7) and many "I forgots" in the store (bacon, milk, etc...).  They give you a security card to get into the grounds ($10 deposit).  The campground was SUPER quiet and quiet hours go to 8am (thank you)!  Only an RV about to leave made a ton of noise at 7.

I would go there again.  It was a safe place close to so many things.  The beach and everything else is VERY close but not so close as to be annoying.... 5 minutes at most.

We wanted somewhere to stay near White Mountain National Park and while Beaver Hollow wasn’t super close it was only a little over 30 minutes away so not too bad. As the description says, this was just an “Ok” campground in our opinion. Here’s the breakdown.

Pros: Super friendly staff! The lady at the front desk was incredibly nice and super helpful. They normally don’t allow anyone to do laundry after the office closes but she was nice enough to keep it open for us and just had us lock the door when we finished. If you have kids they apparently do a hay ride and a little barrel train ride every Saturday. The campground is only about 3 minutes from grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, etc. which is nice. As a side note, I highly recommend checking out Hobbs brewery just up the road if beer/breweries are your thing. They provide a picnic table and a fire ring, always one of our favorite amenities. They have a very nice pool, although we didn’t get a chance to enjoy it, but definitely one of the nicest campground pools we’ve seen.

Cons: Sites are not very large. We were fortunate to have a somewhat decent sized site but the site behind us was so small that their picnic table was practically touching our water and electric hook up area (as you’ll see in pictures) and our sewer was just a couple feet away so that couldn’t have been great for them. A big majority of the sites are taken by full time/seasonal campers and while I have nothing against that it just does tend to make the campground feel more junky and crowded because their sites have so much stuff on them. In relation to that, a lot of the campground did just look very junky. The playground/dog park area was not kept up well at all and again, it just felt crowded most places. Their wi-fi was extremely spotty - as in, one minute you could be streaming with it just fine, the next minute you couldn’t even get online at all. My wife was able to use it for work most the week but it wasn’t strong enough for both of us so I had to use our Verizon jetpack to work off of. But as anyone who camps a lot knows, campground wi-fi is almost never reliable so that wasn’t a complete shock by any means. This is not really a con just a kind of annoying thing - you have to have a key card to get in the campground so you have to make a $20 cash deposit to have that card, but you do get it back when you leave as long as you return the card of course.

Overall: As I’ll say for the 3rd time, it’s just an “Ok” park. Definitely not the worst we’ve stayed in but definitely not the best. It served its purpose of giving us a place to stay for a week to visit NH and that’s about all I’d recommend for anyone else planning to stay here.

ound this campground when searching kind of last minute for somewhere to go for the week of the 4th and I can say it did not disappoint. From what I understand they are under new management as of last year and the new owners wasted no time bringing this place up to speed. They have plenty of sites for everything, new bathrooms/showers, lots of upgrades to plumbing and electricity , as well as newly renovated common areas, like the pool. On top of all that there is a small waterway that leads right out to some tidal rivers that go to the ocean, great for kayaking and fishing. Beautiful wooded sites with sunrises over the marshes. The staff was very friendly and helpful with whatever you needed. We will be back.