Best Tent Camping near Islip Terrace, NY

Sears Bellows in New York is a lot of fun. It really does offer a lot of outdoor activities for you and your family. I have stayed at this campsite 1 time, and stayed 2 nights. This campground does offer tent sites as well as RV/trailer sites. When I went with my friends in college, we just stayed in the tent sites and really enjoyed it. The campground is very well kept and clean which I really liked. They do have quite a bit of garbage's to dump your trash in. One thing I really liked about this campground is that there was a river/pond close by (Bellows Pond). The first night I stayed here my friends and I rented some rowboats and went on the water. It was a lot of fun, and the price of the rowboat was pretty cheap. The next morning we got up and did some hiking. The trails were beautiful, and the flowers were in bloom. There were people who were also biking on these trails, which looked like so much fun! We also saw some people fishing in the pond- and it seemed like most people were catching. The people who stayed in the campsite next to us were cooking up some type of fish for their dinner that they caught that day. One thing to note is that there are not any electrical hook-ups, so if that is something you need you might now want to come stay here. I would love to come back here someday, but stay maybe a day or two longer to do more things- I would also bring my bike and fishing pole to do more outdoor activities. I would also advise to rent the rowboats because that was a lot of fun!

The park itself is lovely and close to some other green areas. The nice thing about this campsite is that it’s so close to NYC. The bad thing about this campsite is that it’s so close to NYC. If you live in NYC this is a good, cheap, super quick escape accessible by public transport. If you’re visiting the area I’d recommend staying in Manhattan/Queens in an AirBNB for the full NYC experience or heading to Long Island, Pennsylvania, “Upstate” New York, or New Jersey for a better nature camping experience. For what it is, this site is a nice green little oasis. It’s National Park Service land and they try really hard to keep things clean and working well with so much traffic. Bring earplus for the airport traffic and the noisy neighbors. Tent sites are pretty and wooded, but there is also a TON of concrete from an old WW2 airfield.

We tried this campground without knowing what was safe and where to stay for visit New York City. It is located in Brooklyn and is little removed from everything. The sites are at Floyd Bennett Field which is an old airfield. The atmosphere here is eerily cool at the same time. You basically park and camp on the asphalt by the old hangars. No hookups at all but they do have a camp store and bath house. If you are tent camping, there are some grassy sites.

The campground is located right on Jamaica Bay so there were people fishing all the time from the seawall. At night, you could hear cars doing burnouts right next to us. To get to all the action in the city, we had to take a bus and then the subway. The travel was a headache but better than trying to drive in to New York City in our RV. One way to improve here would be to have some security at night as well as access to clean water and dump station. They remained locked most of the time for some reason.

The best part of this place was the free tour of Hangar B by some guys doing restoration of old planes (HARP). They had some great stories and gave us history of the planes on display.

This campground is old and there isn't much there, but it depends on why you're camping whether that matters to you.  We wanted to be by the beach and we were.

The playground is new and centrally located.  They also have a horseshoe pit. 

There are lots of RVs but not close to tent sites.  There were lots of showers but only 1 was unlocked (free and with hot water).  The bathroom was very clean and well stocked.

There are 5-7 tent sites.  Ours was #59, well shaded and spacious.  

The water spigot and the gray-water dump are not right by the tent sites.  Seems silly since the tents are the ones using them.

Our site was not clean when we arrived.  There was garbage in the woods and cigarette butts on the ground.  We cleaned up everything ourselves (except in the woods due to poison ivy), but I think they can do better.

There are NO fire pits, you must bring your own.  Fires are allowed but you must have a fire container or bucket for your fire off of the ground. 

The sites all have a table and raised BBQ "pit" for cooking only.

They are extremely nice there.

I still give this campground 4 stars because it was quiet, the campground itself was clean, the bathrooms were clean and it was centrally located to what I wanted to do plus the sites are very big.