A campground owned by criminals?! New obstacles when finding open campgrounds in the off-season

Since we've been RVing in New England this fall, a theme has emerged that has been pervading our blog: The lack of campgrounds open late into the off-season. In 2022 when we returned to our home region, we spent the beginning of November in New Hampshire and had no issues whatsoever, thanks to the year-round Meredith Woods Campground that put us in a perfect location between the Massachusetts border and the White Mountains – aka, between our home-base and our happy place. But, as we recapped with sadness a few weeks ago, Meredith Woods has been taken over by new management and now closes along with 99.9% of the other area campgrounds, right after Columbus Day Weekend.

Each year, our general plan is to return to New England sometime in the fall so that we can spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with family in MA. People often ask us where on earth we camp during that time period, because it is a widely known fact that RV Parks are scarce in the wintertime. Thankfully, we have created a parking spot at my parents' house, on a paved area formerly used as a basketball court. This puts us close to our doctors' offices as well, so we can get our appointments in during these weeks. It's worked out for us, but this year, things would be a little bit different.

My parents decided to tackle some home renovations, which meant that depending on which project was happening, the workers might need to utilize the basketball court. Not a huge deal for us, since we planned on staying out as late into the year as possible. We just didn't know that we'd have our work cut out for us, because our off-season camping options were dwindling right before our eyes.

After Columbus Day Weekend, we booked campgrounds according to our calendars:

1. Spacious Skies Minute Man in Littleton, MA because Anthony had a conference in Boston
2. Field & Stream RV Park in Brookline, NH because we had plans to meet up with friends who live nearby

So far so good finding open campgrounds near where we needed to be, but neither of them are places we would frequent otherwise.

Spacious Skies Minute Man is a hot ticket campground for the metro-Boston area, and we'd being lying if we said we didn't see the appeal. It's near a lot of things, has family-friendly amenities, and gets visitors into Boston in less than an hour (when traffic is at its typical level of terribleness). For us locals, though, the appeal is mostly lost. It was lost even more when we arrived, had to wait over 20 minutes just to get into the campground, and then proceeded to need to back into one of the most difficult sites we've ever had, in the rain, while it was getting dark. This is a typical New England campground. It's plopped right in the woods, and the sites are unlevel and surrounded by obstacles.

We thought we had it bad until later that night, we were sitting inside our rig and suddenly heard a BOOM! Followed by a WHOOSH! We went to see what had happened, and our neighbor had accidentally driven his fifth wheel simultaneously into a tree and another neighbor's bike rack, flattening his tire in the process. The other neighbors ended up calling after-hours maintenance. Long story short, the staff blamed our neighbor with the fifth wheel for taking the wrong road, even though his map literally showed, in sharpie, the directions. Between the staff's wrong directions, the wooded darkness, and oh yeah, the map was actually inaccurate and showed his site as a back-in and not pull-thru, this predicament was waiting to happen. Our biggest gripe was that the worker was so quick to place blame on everyone but the campground, and that is so typical of campgrounds in MA. We've been there, and it isn't fun.

Once daylight arrived and emotions settled, we tried to finish our stays with positive mindsets. I helped our neighbor with his tire, and thankfully his tire and his rig had a lot less damage than we initially feared. We had to interact with staff several more times during our stay, and I'm happy to report that all of these interactions were fine. That doesn't mean I'll forget the first impression, though. MA really needs to do better with their RVer hospitality. We just left thankful that we don't need to stay at campgrounds in the state too often.

Next up was Field & Stream, located just over the MA-NH border and known to be one of the few year-round campgrounds. We had been keeping it on our radar because, come November, we would possibly need to come back. We even said that if we liked our stay, we might book extra days then and there.

Well, we didn't book extra days. Similar to Minute Man, we didn't have the best first impression. We called them twice on our way up from Minute Man because we hoped we could check in early. No answer, and we didn't want to risk going and not being able to get into our site. It's a small campground without any overflow parking. So we just stopped at a Shaw's parking lot for an extended lunch break until check-in time rolled around. Only, we got there a half hour after check-in started, and no one was in the office. We didn't have our site number, so we didn't have anywhere we could go. The office had a phone that connects directly to the manager, but we wasn't answering his phone. While we were trying to call, another rig arrived. Now our two RVs were taking up pretty much the entire entrance, which was awkward. Finally, the manager came over and gave us our site info. The sites are packed really close together and the roads were narrow, so even getting into our pull-thru was tricky. To make matters worse, someone had parked their car right behind our site, where we needed to make a wide turn. To avoid hitting the car, we took the turn shallow, but then we needed to skirt the electric pedestal. Thankfully, the car owner noticed us pulling in and came out to move it. This gave us room to back up and reposition ourselves.

While all this was happening, the manger, who was absent when we needed him, evidently decided to try and make himself useful now. He came over to us and kept telling me, "Tell him to pull to the right." No. I've navigated Anthony into well over 100 sites at this point, and pulling right would take out the pedestal because the trailer wouldn't react fast enough. I ignored the manager and proceeded to tell Anthony to back up once the car was out of the way. "Pull to the right," the manager repeated. I told him that we knew what we were doing, and we were just waiting for the car to pull away. I didn't want to have to take my attention off Anthony because we've been operating without a backup camera for several months (long story), and I didn't want him accidentally backing up into the car. But the manager completely misread the situation and could have put us, and the car owner, in harm's way.

We prefer to not have anyone help us get into spots because we know our rig, but there is a right and wrong way to help. Interrupting me and dictating what to do isn't helping. A simple "Do you need help?" would suffice! Or wait for us to ask!

Once settled in, we immediately said to each other, "Well, maybe we don't come back here." But, like with Minute Man, our stay actually wasn't bad. Everyone knows the sites are really cramped, so everyone looked out for each other, moving our cars and picnic tables to give space for rigs trying to come in and out. The campground had a little footbridge that led to a field with a picnic pavilion, dog park, and really awesome communal firepit. It's also near some cool places for hiking, biking, and boating. We had a lovely autumn farm day with our friends in Milford, about 15 minutes away. On another day, we went over to a sculpture park owned by the Andres Institute of Art, just around the corner from the campground. The institute exhibits dozens of modern art sculptures along hiking paths on an old ski hill. It was quite a workout, but it offered something unique, which we appreciated. That same day, we also stopped at the Brookline Covered Bridge, which is only a couple minutes up the street from the campground and across from the boat launch and picnic area at Pontanipo Pond. This is also the start of one of the area's rail trails.

As far as a jumping off point for exploring and recreation, Field & Stream served just fine, but besides those couple of fun days, our week was mostly filled with work. We tried to get our exercise by walking laps around the campground, but two things were working against us: The small size and the fact that on 99% of the days, the other end of the campground reeked like sewage. We have no idea what it was, and the smell seemed to appear out of nowhere. At times it was so bad, we couldn't even drive our truck past there without holding our breath. We were just glad our campsite wasn't near there.

Our work days were also a bit frustrating because the campground was extremely loud. Everyone in such close quarters meant we could literally hear our neighbors' TV through our rig walls. The campground dogs also didn't like having so little space, so most of them spent the day barking out the windows. To top it all off, somewhere just beyond the campground, crews were cutting down trees, and so all day long we were hearing the buzzing of chainsaws and the toppling of tree trunks.

We stuck with our decision to not return to Field & Stream unless we needed to take desperate measures. This left us flailing. We needed the comfort of familiarity, and of all the NH campgrounds we've camped at in the past, we knew of one that was still year-round: Danforth Bay in Freedom, NH. It was a far trek, but we would rather be far away in a campground we knew we wouldn't have issues at.

We settled in nicely at an almost-empty Danforth Bay. Off-season camping brought the construction, so we needed to deal with bulldozers and woodchippers. Otherwise, we have no complaints, and we didn't expect to. The weekdays gave us space away from neighbors, with only a few seasonal RVers coming and going. The weekends got a little busier with people soaking up the last mild weather days. The staff at Danforth are always super nice, and we had a convenient place to do our laundry and get packages, which is always a plus. Lots of the amenities at the park are summer-only, but with 200 acres of land, we never needed to worry about going in circles on our campground walks. We weren't sure how long we'd stay at Danforth, but the great thing about off-season camping is that we don't risk availability filling up. We couldn't think of anywhere better to go, and so we ended up extending our reservation a couple of times. Before we knew it, November had arrived, and it was time to start making our way back south.

Read about our hiking adventures the last time we stayed at Danforth Bay:

Catching Foliage in the White Mountains

We had delayed our arrival back to New England, mainly due to rig repairs and a sick kitty. It all turned out for the best because we had a fabulous time hunkering down in Allegheny National Forest. Only downside is, Allegheny isn’t home to us. There is a National Forest

Brighter on WheelsNicole Anderson

We couldn't return to our home-base just yet. My parents were still in the throws of renovations, and we had one other campground already booked for the second week in November, which we'll be writing about in its own blog post. However, we did need to position ourselves somewhere near the state border because we had some events to attend in the area. We knew campgrounds would be slim pickings, especially if we tried to avoid repeat visits to our previous choices, aka the post-Columbus-Day letdowns. We thought we found a new option when our research turned up a place called Berry's Grove, which used to be a monthly and seasonal-only campground, but looked like they were possibly now allowing transients. Another small RV park and not a lot of amenities, but the location was good, and we just needed a place to hang our hats for a weekend. I went onto the website to book a campsite, and before I could even see if they allowed transients, I had some serious deja vu. I swear I had been on this website before. I had read the campground rules. I had read the FAQs. I had seen the rates page. What was going on?

Then it dawned on me. This website was identical to Field & Stream's! I pulled them up side-by-side and some pages were verbatim, while others changed only the description of the park.

This made me wonder, did the campgrounds have the same owners? They weren't located far from each other, so it was possible. If that was the case, would Berry's Grove be any better than Field & Stream, or would we we better off going with the "devil we know" instead of trying somewhere new? Berry's Grove was also the worse rated of the two. I had seen one reviewer on RV Life mention the names of the owners of Berry's Grove, and so I Googled them to see if they were also listed as the owners of Field & Stream. I was not prepared for the results. The top result of my search had nothing to do with the campgrounds, but instead, was this press release:

So allegedly, the campground owners had defrauded MassHealth (the state's Medicaid insurance) when their children falsely submitted timesheets that they were serving as Personal Care Attendants to them. We didn't dig any further to see if the family was convicted, but this begged the question: Did we stay at a campground owned by alleged criminals?!

My digging took me down the path of trying to see if the Berry family owned both Berry's Grove and Field & Stream, because either we were about to give money to alleged frauds, or we already had. But, my detective work led me to a LinkedIn page of the real owner of Field & Stream, someone seemingly unaffiliated with the Berrys. But then, how have they ended up with the same website?

That answer remains undiscovered, but upon closer inspection, I did notice that Berry's Grove made a major faux pas.

Right there in the FAQs, Berry's Grove tells people to email them photos of their older rigs. Only, their email is not info@fsrp.com. That's the email address for Field & Stream! That was enough to convince me that if any plagiarism was happening here, it was on the part of Berry's Grove, and given their alleged dubious history, no one was surprised. This made us wonder, though, did they both use the same web designer and that's who copied the site? Or does one of them know HTML and pilfered the source code from Field & Stream? Or perhaps everyone did in fact play nice, and someone shared their web design. As tempting as it was to blow this case wide open, we had more important things to do, like find a place to stay for the second weekend in November. We hung up our investigative journalist hats and moved on.

I scrounged around for any type of site I could think of, even looking at Harvest Hosts and HipCamp. MA really is a little RVing nightmare. One of the nearby Harvest Hosts listed a $50/night charge, even for the first night, which is supposed to be free for members. This place also prohibited dogs from walking on their grass, but instead of saying no dogs, they tell RVers to walk their dogs off property. These people apparently don't realize that a dog's toilet is the outdoors, and they will not wait to cross property lines when nature is calling and nature is literally at their paws. Then we have the well-meaning Boondockers Welcome hosts, who say they accept rigs over 45ft but then warn people that "large RVs probably won't be able to make the turn around in our driveway, so they'll need to back in. Oh, but if there are cars on the side of the road, backing in might not be possible either." And the HipCamp hosts who think it's appropriate to charge $75-100/night for a patch of grass. I mean, they're not totally wrong.

Already, good campgrounds are hard to come by in this part of New England. Add in trying to find availability this late in the season, and it's just plain exhausting. We always knew we were lucky to have our home-base during these months, but now we appreciate it even more.

So, where did we end up staying? Well, we eventually waved our white flag and booked a site at Spacious Skies Minute Man again. We actually don't know what their open dates are because we thought they closed at the end of October, but it turns out they were still accepting reservations in November. So we grabbed a site. But then we ultimately decided to not stay there anyway and instead, stayed further north in NH. That, too, will be its own blog post story in the future. Lots of reasons to SUBSCRIBE! What we will say now, though, is that despite all the hassle, we never felt like we had nowhere to go. Sometimes our choices weren't ideal, but they were manageable.

After our challenging hunt for year-round RV parks and discovering that all the online resources weren't even close to updated thanks to all the recent management changes at local campgrounds, we decided to compile our own list. We stuck with only NH locations, and we have no idea how long it'll be relevant, but hopefully it will help both us and others in the future, who are trying to navigate this off-season camping craziness.