When: March 31 – April 5, 2021

Duration: 6 days, 5 nights

Location: Front Royal, VA

Cost: $15 per night (with Membership + $85 utility fee)

Miles from SE PA: 246 miles

Site#: 156

The Details

This year, our kids had a 6-day Spring Break over Easter. Since Easter was at the end of March, we chose a place south of us at North Fork Resort in Front Royal, Virginia, to take our first camping trip of the season. We were, however, sadly mistaken that it would be warm, but I’ll get to that in a moment.  

First, I need to provide a little background about how we arrived at our decision of North Fork Resort. In 2017, I accompanied the Faunt and Funcle to the Hershey RV Show. Since we had purchased our camper the year before at the Hershey RV Show, I decided to stick to the arena in search of what type of merchandise, tips/tricks, etc. I could learn about. While making my loop around someone stopped me and asked if I wanted to camp at Gettysburg. Well, of course I did! Who wouldn’t?! Tell me more. I’ll spare you the boring details but we ended up eventually buying a camping time share, which I will surely create a future post about to share the details. With this time share came the opportunity to buy into a Coast to Coast Membership. The membership allows you to camp for $10-$15 a night at more than 200 campgrounds around the US and Canada. Sounds heavenly, right? Embarrassingly, we have paid for the membership for 4 years and have never had an opportunity to use it. I hear you all gasping.

I decided that this year would be the year we would take the plunge. I went into the portal and attempted to book, except…the place I wanted to book, Shenandoah Crossings, had a 14-day minimum stay (due to the pandemic). Ok, well that won’t work for us. I ended up picking North Fork Resort instead. It boasted of scenic views of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River and looked like a great place for the men to fish.

The trip immediately started out with a bit of a hiccup. My parents joined us for the trip and were the first to arrive. Crammy Grammy called me to say that they had assigned our spot to someone else. When we rolled up to the gate about 45 minutes later, I informed the woman at the gate that my mother thought someone was already in our site. She told me that was impossible and wished me on my way. I’ll cut to the chase: Someone was, indeed, in our site and we ended up having to move. It wasn’t a huge deal and we were excited about having a site on the river.

Once we got down to the river, we understood why there were empty spots down there. Firstly, I will say that I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they had just trimmed and cut down a ton of trees and most likely were just gearing up for the 2021 camping season but our sites were mud pits. Additionally, no matter where you were placed, you had no room to stretch out. The sites were on top of one another. We didn’t use our fire pit because we were afraid we’d catch our campers on fire.

The campground appeared to be more geared towards the Seasonal/Owner crowd. Our fellow campers enjoyed racing their golf carts around until midnight, hooting and hollering and tossing their adult beverage cans to the curb. On Saturday night, a band played…until 11 PM. I am not a night owl and call me old fashion but we go camping to enjoy the peace and quiet. This camping experience was just not our cup of tea.

The entire trip wasn’t a bust. Even though it snowed, was frigidly cold the first 3 days, and we made the rookie mistake of forgetting to disconnect our water hose from our unit (oops! the line froze at the source), we still managed to have a good time.

The area was great for kayaking and fishing. The Faunt and Funkle and their family stayed at Shenandoah River State Park and we were quite envious of their large pads (pictured below), the peace and serenity, and how close it was to bike trails, hiking trails, kayak launches, and fishing on the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. If I were to repeat the trip again, I would certainly stay there instead of North Fork Resort. See my rating below.