Lamb City Campground

We have been staying at Lamb City Campground in Phillipston MA for over 3 months, so it is time for a review.

We like this campground and it has been a good location for us this summer – about an hour from Boston, an hour from Springfield, an hour from my softball field, an hour from Worcester and only 25 minutes from the wonderful cabin in the woods owned by Jett’s brother Ray and his talented wife Kim.  We have used the proximity to the cabin to visit often.

But this is not a review of the cabin; it is a review of the campground.

The is the most “weekend” place that we have stayed at for an entire season.  Seasonal campgrounds tend to attract long-term campers, but this campground seems to be about 90% families who are in residence only on weekends.  During the week the place is a ghost town.  I walk the dog on weekday mornings and see not a single living soul.  At night it gets downright spooky.  It is us and the mosquitos.

The campground has a pond and LOTS of trees.  And the summer has been very wet.  So, yes, there are mosquitos.  But they mostly keep to the heavily wooded areas, though a few have found their way into the RV.

We have a site very close to the pond.  If you stand outside and peer carefully between the RVs across the way, you can see a bit of it.  We are a short walk from the firepit where communal campfires burn each weekend night.  On the 4th of July weekend a live band set up near the firepit and there was dancing in the street.  We didn’t join in and neither did many others – there were about 20 people there at 10pm.

Which is another aspect of Lamb City which is less than endearing: it is very kid-oriented and not very adult-oriented.  There are planned activities each weekend, but they are mostly for kids: crafts, face-painting, races, fire engine rides.  Each Saturday night there is an adult activity – usually a dance or karaoke – which is poorly attended.  It is not a friendly place.  Most families, when they visit on weekends, bring their own friends and do not look for friends in the campground.  I have met a handful of neighbors, but have not been invited to share so much as a beer.  Jett has met no one.  So… a lonely place.

Our campsite is large, with plenty of room for both the truck and the “summer rat” – the 2009 Ford Focus that we bought to use for the summer. It is a full hookup site, with water, electric and sewer. It also has cable TV which is pretty basic – about 30 channels, of which we use maybe 10. It also, for cable, has terrible reception. All of the local channels and some of the cable channels can usually not be watched on the living room television because the picture is so fuzzy. If I were to give the cable a grade it would be D.

The biggest problem with the site: the sand. Apparently a tree was removed before we arrived, which left a hole in the ground. The hole was filled and then the entire site was covered in sand. Not gravel, like many other sites, but sand. We had great difficulty getting the RV positioned because it sank into the sand. It was like parking the RV on the beach. Worse, the sand is tracked into the RV every time we enter. We have swept about a bushel of sand out of the RV this summer. Not pleasant at all.

We put down a second outdoor carpet and that helped, but it hasn’t eliminated the problem. We have already told the office staff that if we return next year we will want gravel put over the sand.

The facilities? Well, the camp store is large and quite nice. We haven’t used it a lot because a shopping center is nearby, but it has just about everything a camper would need. There is a large activity hall which is… functional. No effort was expended to make it attractive. There is also a small activity hall, public restrooms with showers, a very small but decent laundry room and a playground that the kids seem to like, as well as a beach volleyball court, shuffleboard courts, two swimming pools and several horseshoe pits. The pond is used for boating and fishing (catch-and-release) but no swimming. There is a path around the pond – about a mile in length – that Rusty enjoyed the one time we traversed it.

So, bottom line: adequate, lonely, sandy. And, perhaps most importantly, affordable. The entire season here cost us just $2750. Any other option in the Boston area would run at least twice that amount. So while it isn’t perfect, it is a very good option.