Tammy found Beagle Bay RV Haven & Campground on-line the second day we were at Cliffside Park. I called a few days later and made a reservation. I talked with Kim, who wanted no information from me other than my name and a request that I give her a call 30 minutes before arrival. The reason for the call is that they are currently renovating the office, so it is closed for registration.
The Beagle Bay would be about a five hour drive from the Double J Campground in Illinois. With Eva and a fueling stop, it would probably be closer to 6 hours.
Sometimes a campground can be really nice, but the experience you have there may not be great. Kim, who runs the campground made sure that our experience was great, from the minute we arrived. When she met us at the front of the campground, the first thing she said to us was “Let’s just get you off the highway and into a site so you can relax and enjoy the rest of your day”. When was the last time you ever heard that at a campground? Well, we have been doing this since 1988, and I’ve never heard that. You are not going to find a nicer staff than what you will get at Beagle Bay. They have set the bar really high from a customer satisfaction standpoint.
Kim took us to our site and told us to relax and they would be by later to register our stay. As soon as she left our site I heard her asking another camper how her day had been. I turned to Tammy and I said “It’s amazing how much difference a great attitude can bring to an RV campground”.
Beagle Bay has been under new management for going on four years. They have made many improvements to the campground, and they are renovating to make it even better. They went from 80 sites to 43, in order to give more space to campers. The sites are very nice, with plenty of room between campers. These sites may have been the best maintained that we have come across on this trip. Even though they were gravel sites, they were level. There was grass outside the trailer door that was mowed, unlike most of the deep grass Eva and I had been walking through over the last two weeks.
When the staff came to finish registering us for the night, they also brought us the campground rules. I was happy to see how well defined their rules were including “Be a good Citizen and Neighbor” as well as rules relating to keeping sites clean and tidy. There were some longer term campers here but their sites were maintained as if they were here just for the night. This is exactly what I would expect from any campground, but rarely see. So the rules are obviously enforced.
Now another surprise for us was how nice all of our neighbors were. If we didn’t have severe weather coming in late the next day I would have wanted to stay for a few more days. However, I am not a fan of driving in the pouring rain, or hunkering down in a hail storm. So unfortunately we had to leave the next day.
Five words sum up our stay at Beagle Bay: “I want to go back!”. Beagle Bay is near Sarcoxie, Missouri. This is a campground you won’t ever regret stopping at.
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