Columbia River RV Park

Ok as a Portland Basecamp

Coming into Portland for a week to visit with friends, we tried to get into our first choice park in the area (Janzen Beach), but they were full up. This place was our second choice, and they offered a reasonable weekly rate of $168 with Good Sam.

Check in was easy and friendly, and we were handed a map of the campground with a bunch of rules and regulations. Our site was in the newer back area of the campground.

The good:

- This place is immaculately maintained. The hook-up are top notch, and everything looks clean and trimmed.
- The spots are pretty approachable and many pull-thus.

The bad:

- The spots are a bit closer together than is our preference, but there is a bit of space. Just enough to park your rig and a vehicle. Although many had multiple vehicles they were trying to cram in.
- The rules. Ugh. Lots of them.
- Unfriendly vibe. We had neighbors use our spot for guest parking on multiple times, and people walking through our site. Walking around the park, hardly anyone is outside and hardly encountered a single smiling face.
- The WiFi was intermittent at our site.
- Nothing to walk to from the campground. There is no water access (the marina across the street is lined with a barbed wire fence), and there's no shopping or restaurants nearby. As we were deep in on a work project (we work from our RV-home), this made it less than convenient to go grab a quick bite.
- The neighborhood around it isn't the Portland everyone raves about - we found the environment rather run down and encountered rudeness. Such as on a walk outside the park on the sidewalk, a driver shouted obscenities at us - for no reason!
- Traffic! To get on I-5 to get into Portland, there tends to be some back-up on the ramp during rush hours.
- Airport noise - you're on the approach path for the airport, so expect lots of place noise.

When all added together, our experience here just was not pleasant. When our friends invited us to courtesy park at their place instead - we decided to forfeit 4 nights of our pre-paid stay and left early. A first for us!

If we had no other option in Portland in the future, we might return. But this place definitely did not leave a positive taste for us, and actually gave us a bad first impression of Portland.