Best Glamping near Peterborough, NH

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.

Wonderful sites that are spacious! Clean, WiFi available, a pond for swimming, playground, free paddle boats :), a recreational hall with a pool table & video games, laundromat. They have lots of fun family activities! We stayed with our parents in their camper for a couple nights and had such a positive experience there! They have 3 separate ponds-one for fishing, one for boating & the larger one is for swimming. Plenty of bathrooms throughout campground and sites are not expensive to reserve. Clean & up-to-date bathrooms with hot showers. Family-oriented with friendly staff. We will be returning, for sure!

Pros- very clean, bathrooms kept up with regularly. Staff is very nice. They offer boat rentals, canoes, paddle boats and kayaks. Store on site and they do activities during the week. Definitely more kids friendly I think. They do have a pool, park, dog park, lake and food trucks visits at times. They have community fires and dances. Pet friendly. Wood available on site.

Cons- loud cars going all night, some lights in your face. Some people tend to fly down the road on golf carts. You can also hear the main road from the open style campsite. No privacy. People will walk threw your tent site. They will talk during the night while doing this, smoking seems to be allowed at pool. No fires between 9am-5pm.

Overall we had a good time.

(As a Tent Camper)

Let me start this off with there are not many campgrounds I would rate this low. There are a lot of little detractors that add up quickly. 

First, one of the pros, we enjoyed their small but nice petting zoo of a few goats and a horse. Their general store was adequate.

Now some of the cons we encountered. 

The other campers were very loud and ruckus, especially in the safari field with the RVs.

The campsites have VERY little to no privacy, we had to hang up tarps in between us and our neighbor or else we would practically be looking straight at each other if we both had a camp fire at the same time. 

Something I've never encountered before, but our fire pit was not the typical tire ring, it was some other type of ring I've never seen before. It was almost as if it was designed to not allow any air flow for the fire. We thought we were going crazy until our neighbors were having an issue too and had to plug in a hair dryer and every 5 minutes turn it on to keep the fire from going out. And our wood was pretty dry too. 

The pools were very lack luster, they are quite small for the amount of guests in the campground. They get crowded way too fast, we had probably a 2 ft bubble around us in the pool and could not move around at all if we wanted too. The kiddie pool which is 2 ft deep was a waste, it is too big with very little amount of kids who actually use it. 

It was the first time we thought we had actually wasted a weekend camping. Would not return.

We took our new to us hybrid camper out for its inaugural trip.

We chose to stay in the wooded loop of the campground and we were very happy with our site, #66. That section has about 12 sites, some big and some on the smaller side. Our site was easy to back into, even more so since no one was in the site across from us. Our site was very spacious, level and included a picnic table, fire ring, and nicely placed hookups for water and electric. We had easy access to trails that went along the river behind some of the sites with a few paths down to the river.

Everyone we encountered was friendly and respectful. There are quiet hours from 10pm-8am that are enforced. We were grateful to not have to hear loud partying going on into the night. There was car noise from nearby Rt 10 on the other side of the river, but nothing you can do about that.

We asked for assistance at the office with our first time using a pumping station at the end of the trip. We were given friendly helpful assistance and some great tips and advice for the future.

This was a nice enjoyable first visit for us. We will definitely be adding it to our list of places to visit again, but likely later in the year when we can enjoy the river and activities a bit more. We did not explore the options for bike, kayak, and canoe rentals but would like to in the future.

A little tip about GPS: if you’re using Apple Maps, it will likely take you to a turn that is not the campground entrance, there’s even a hand-written sign on someone’s lawn that has directions to the entrance (seems to happen frequently, I guess). We chose this campground because we got a booking discount on the Dyrt app.

Pros: Friendly staff, clean bathrooms, clean grounds, gated campground with card key access in/out of the grounds, 2 pools (closed for the season during our stay), pavilion, activities/entertainment, fairly quiet during quiet hours, laundromat, playground, dog park, boating pond, Horse shoe & Basketball court.

Cons: No hot water for showers, no separation between some tent sites, strong sewer smell in woman’s restroom & on some campsites, late check-in (7:45 p.m.) was a bit tricky — an envelope with a key card and map were placed in a mailbox for us due to store/office closing @ 6 but no mention of this in the confirmation email & long wait time on hold to find out site # (not included in confirmation email). I believe they use a 3rd party company for reservations. You do not get a choice during the online booking to choose the campsite to reserve & the site # is not included in the confirmation email. The mailbox that had our envelope in it was difficult to locate & we may have not found it if it weren’t for a very kind camper that showed us when she saw us looking around confused at the entrance.

So this is a pro & a con, I will try to start with the negative & end with the positive- Our site was in a field that was near the bathrooms. We were on S1, near a septic pipe & there was a severely nauseating, strong smell of sewage coming from it; we went to the front desk the next day & asked to move to S5, as we were the only ones on any of the 6 tent field sites. They were completely fine with it & apologized saying that they recently had someone there to fix the septic concern. We dragged our things down by noon. Within the hr, there was a large canopy tent set up right in between us & the bathrooms that we were now much closer to & there was a band setting up for their afternoon show. The live band was cool but we had golf carts & parked vehicles pretty much surrounding us & some right on our campsite, it was a little awkward. Then around 8, there was a gentleman that started setting up for a comedy show that they would be doing that night. A staff member came to our site and let us know that there is an 18+ comedy show but there was a children’s movie being played on a big screen on the other side of the campground. This was a nice alternative, however it left us with 2 choices: leave our site (with a fire we just started) for a couple hrs & have strangers & golf carts directly on our campsite again or stay on our site, watch the stand up comedy show & hope our 9 yr old won’t get the jokes. We chose to stay. So, here’s the main positive about the events — the band was good & the stand up comedy was awesome. For the most part, the comedians kept it fairly clean & our 9 yr old did not get any of the jokes that were a little sassy. All 3 comedians were clearly aware that there was a child in the audience & one specific comedian (Rob Steen) said right from the get-go that he was going to keep it clean for his bit & use innuendos that would go right over his head. There’s a high likelihood that we wouldn’t have went to see the comedians if it were held at the pavilion because of it being an adult show so we were kind of glad everything unfolded like that because they were really fantastic. We might return to the campground again but hopefully would get the choice of picking a more secluded campsite next time.