I've camped my whole life and never have I been treated this poorly. When my friends and I booked this trip we asked a ton of questions. We are all in our mid/late twenties and while we don't "party hardy", we do enjoy sitting around the campfire talking until around 2am or so. When we go to a new campsite we always check to make sure that this is okay (we don't scream or anything but 8-10 people talking at night in the woods can seem a little loud sometimes) and ask to be put at the farthest campsite if possible. After being assured twice by the owner that all was well and good, we booked 4 campsites (3 together and 1 apart).
When we arrived we realized we didn't need the 4th campsite but agreed that we should pay for it since it was last minute and the owner offered to take $30 off and we stated we would stay on the 3 connecting campsites. That's when the trouble started. After we were led to our campsites, the owner realized there was already someone on our third site so went back to see what was up. He returned with his wife who stated that the people had a baby and she would not move them so we had two choices: Stay on the two sites and move Saturday when the people left or take our money and leave (this was all said with a healthy dose of attitude). We were a bit stunned. No one had said anything argumentative and we wondered what we had done to anger her. (Also because we were sure she wouldn't take that attitude if she knew we were older) Of course we weren't going to leave after driving 41/2 hours with no alternative campground so we agreed and asked for a refund on that site for the night. She replied that, "since she gave us a $30 discount she would only give us another $9". And then proceeded to tell us "kids" (I'm almost 30 so was slightly flattered and annoyed) that this was not a party ground etc, etc. The whole scene was very rude and disrespectful. It may have stemmed from the fact that they took IDs from the absolute youngest members of the group (23 &24) when we checked in. Once they left, my group was a little upset but I convinced them that she most likely had a bad experience and we just needed to show them we were good campers. Boy was I wrong. The rest of the night they patrolled our area, warned us to stay away from other campers we had befriended and just generally harassed us. I was very proud of our group. Everyone smiled and followed the rules and kept their mouths shut. We never did move to the third site-who wants to move their stuff after it's set up?
It seemed to be all well until Sunday. The owner came over in the afternoon and complimented us on Friday night but said Saturday got a little loud when we were talking around the fire pit. We apologized and told him that there would only be 5 of us that night and we would be going to bed earlier. When we came home from karaoke that night we sat around playing cards. As we had the previous nights, we checked to see our noise level from the road to make sure we were fine-and we were just a light murmur (barely discernible from the other campsite). A little before midnight the owner comes flying in on his golf cart and starts screaming at us (literally! -our neighbors turned on their lights when he started yelling). He told us he was sick of getting calls saying we were noisy and we needed to, "go to bed or get out" and if we didn't he would, "call the sheriff". We were stunned. No warning that someone thought we were being loud (and we were checking), just a disrespectful and patronizing attitude. He wouldn't talk to us and proceeded to pretty much stalk us the rest of the night-even waiting for me outside the bathroom at one point. This angered our entire group. If we had once shown them disrespect, or partied hard, or been crazy loud I would have said we had earned everything we got. But we weren't. We were harassed and harangued simply because they thought we were "kids".
All in all, we paid about $500 to stay on two (instead of 4) sites, got told to keep to ourselves, were harassed repeatedly, and ultimately screamed at. I honestly feel that if they had known that most of us are older, they would have not had a problem. My boyfriend wanted to give them a piece of his mind when we left but I knew it wouldn't do any good - they simply thought of us as troublesome college kids. The owner did apologize when we turned the keys in but also asked us to not make a reservation next year. No worries there. I will be sure that neither myself nor anyone I know ever goes there. I have never written a bad review but this experience sickened me. To treat someone with respect but get nothing but a crappy attitude and harassment back simply because of age is just atrocious.
