This is our second stay at this nice Corps of Engineers campground, located on Saylorville Lake, northwest Des Moines, IA. Things this stay are much the same as they were when we were here two years ago, so you might want to check out my review from that stay. I’ll just focus on a few fresh observations in this post.

One thing I noticed this stay is how many campsites are rather unlevel front to back. Our site is steep enough that I have the landing gear of the 5th wheel extended about as far as I’ve ever extended it. I think a larger motorhome might end up with the front wheels well off the ground in this site. There are, of course, a number of spots that are level or at least “level enough” but because of our site I began noticing others and realized that several sites are like this.

Also, I’ve learned that, while there are no sewer sites here, there are several water hookup sites scattered around the park. The reason I missed them on our first stay is that the water spigots aren’t near the electric posts. Instead, they are stand alone water hookups either along the roads between the campsites or well behind them. I think that originally the idea was that people would be able to get water from communal spigots at various places around the park. At some point the decision was made to allow the closest campsite to the outlets to claim them and hook up to them if they wanted. There’s an extra $2 charge for those campsites (since we have an America the Beautiful pass we pay half for the site, making the extra charge just $1). Someone told me that the common practice is for the person in a water campsite to put a “Y” splitter at the faucet so that people can get water out of it even though someone is hooked up to it. If having a water hookup is important to you be sure to study the campground map when making reservations here.

My Verizon has a barely-working 3G signal here. It seems to work okay during the day and then as evening comes it slows down considerably. I was able to get satellite TV by putting the dish up close to the road. I’m guessing that people with a portable dish have a considerably better chance of getting satellite than do those with a roof mounted dish.

In my previous review I mentioned some bad weather and we had a repeat of that our first night here. We kept an eye on things as a couple of tornado warnings were issued for the counties just west of us. Aside from considerable rain falling, though, we came through the warnings without any problem.

We still like this campground a lot and will likely make it our place to stay when visiting family here in central Iowa.