Camping is fun, camping is exciting, camping gets you into the great outdoors and away from the tv so what more could you want? Well somewhere to go would be a good start and so here we take a look at one woman’s thoughts on the best campgrounds in America. Is she right? I think all of us have an idea of what we consider the best of the best but Megan L. Wood surely throws up some great places in her article.
Best campgrounds in America
Recently, I had the following conversation with my boyfriend:
Me: “I love to camp! Let’s quit your job and go camping for an entire year at different campgrounds across the United States. We can write a book about it!”
Him: “We don’t have any camping gear.”
Me: “Yes, we do. We have camping dishes and a dog.”
Him: “We can call the book, How We Accidentally Killed Our Beagle: A Year Of Camping.”
Okay, so neither my boyfriend (or my dog) are interested in excessive camping. But I am. Growing up, my family went on about one vacation every year. When money was tight, my parents would attach the pop-up camper to the back of our van and drive all five of us to a campground. Though I loved cooking over a fire, sleeping bags, and endless games of Connect Four—plus pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder—looking back I can see my parents picked some pretty generic campsites. Mostly, they were just black patches of dirt with enough space to park the car next to a circle of stones and a picnic table. After riding my bike all afternoon, it was difficult to tell exactly which of the 100 or so identical campsites belonged to my family. Campground amenities included a ranger’s station and a murky lake, maybe some hiking trails. There are some uninspired campgrounds out there.
Yosemite Valley
But the good old U.S. of A. is also home to campgrounds with plenty of personality. There are tens of thousands of campsites in the United States, and the National Park Service is ramping things up to get ready for their centennial in 2016. A campground doesn’t have to be a National Park to be awesome, though clearly federal funding can’t hurt.
Here are seven of the country’s awesome campgrounds. BYO dog. It adds to the awesomeness.
Check out some of our greatest parks here
“In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” Theodore Roosevelt
If you have a favorite area that you think belongs in the best campgrounds in America then please let us know below.
