Duncans Mills Camping Club is a private campground located on the Russian River. You can request to stay there for 3 days and 2 nights as a trial before committing to the lifetime membership. We decided to give this a try for our anniversary weekend to see how we would like it. You are required to do a tour, which only takes about an hour and meet with one of the representatives to review the membership opportunity. Casini Ranch is another popular public campground on the Russian River, we haven’t been there yet but wanted to mention it for anyone looking for places to go.
Russian River
The Howard Family got our typical late Friday evening start, I don’t know how we will ever manage to get home from work and just hit the road. If anyone has tips for this, please share, we need them! The drive up was pretty uneventful, everyone was getting pretty hungry as we got closer to the campground. As we drove up to the campground we noticed there was a pizza place and some cute shops nearby. After we got settled in our campsite, Mark went to pick up a pizza and we settled in for the night. The weather was cool, and the fog was coming in, much different than a typical warm August night at home.
Saturday morning, we decided to take our dog Lucy for a walk and explore the campground in the daylight. The grounds are really beautiful and there is good separation between campsites. Duncans Mills is a riverfront property in a very quiet and serene setting, you feel like you’re a world away despite being only an hour and a half from home. We all walked down to the private beach where they have complimentary kayaks and canoes to use during your visit. Ryan gave the playground a try and we walked down to the café right outside the campgrounds to get a cup of coffee. The campground was having their annual kid’s day, talk about picking a perfect weekend to go, so we headed back to the trailer to get ready for that. They had a bounce house, games, sack races, tug of war and a BBQ lunch for everyone. The kids had a great time and it was a really nice community of people. You can definitely tell that the members of this campground really love it and take a lot of pride in putting on fun events.
After the kid’s day events, we took a tour of the property and reviewed the membership information, it was all very enticing, especially knowing how much campgrounds charge for full hookup spots now. We decided to sleep on the information before deciding. Midafternoon, we thought it would be fun to drive down to the Sonoma Coast, which is only a 10-minute drive away. We explored the area for a little bit and the cute little shopping center near the campground. That evening, we enjoyed dinner and smores by the campfire and just took advantage of the quiet, relaxing atmosphere.
Ultimately, we decided against a membership at Duncans Mills Camping Club. We really enjoyed our time there, we just felt that since we were so new to having our trailer we didn’t want to feel obligated to have to go there if we bought a membership. Also, sometimes it’s nice to get away from the heat, but we really enjoy warmer weather and swimming at a lake during the summer. Our kids were pretty little when we took this trip, Jack wasn’t even six months old. As the boys get older, we want to travel to national parks and explore a lot more. All in all, we had a fantastic anniversary weekend. Duncans Mills Camping Club was a perfect place to celebrate 11 years of marriage!
We hadn’t been back from Pine Mountain Lake for but a week and Mark was already talking about taking the trailer out again. The weather was heating up and we were in store for some 100+ degree days, so we thought it would be a great idea to head towards the coast to try and get some relief from the heat. Well, apparently everyone had the same idea as us. We called a bunch of different RV Parks and campgrounds to just be told they were booked. Finally, we called Bodega Bay RV Park and they happened to have one spot left, but it didn’t have hookups. The hookup thing wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that we don’t have a generator yet. I know, I referenced the no generator issue in the last post, but the amount of research that goes into figuring out what generator we want could be a whole other blog post. Anyways, we decided to take the spot as we figured it wasn’t going to be hot enough in Bodega to need the AC and we can run electricity off the battery.
Trailaler Adventures 