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Coronado Village Mobile Home & RV Resort – Albuquerque, NM

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Coronado Village Mobile Home & RV Resort – Albuquerque, NM

Coronado Village Mobile Home & RV Resort is one of our favorite RV parks. Nestled in north Albuquerque, NM, near I-25 and Paseo Del Norte Blvd NE, it’s a surprisingly tranquil spot despite its proximity to the freeway, thanks to its vastness with 350 spaces. We visited twice in May 2023 during spring and again in October 2023 for the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

We travel to Albuquerque often due to Martin’s Vedic chanting workshops and prefer to stay at Coronado Village. No amenities are within walking distance unless you’re up for a mile or two trek.

The standout feature of this park is its 7-acre grassy area at the southern end. Google calls it Scallop Park, though it’s entirely within Coronado Village. The greenbelt boasts large cottonwood, fir, cedar, and mulberry trees.

Springtime in the park is delightful. There is a blanket of yellow dandelions and their seedheads, and the mulberry and cottonwood trees are budding with new growth as the temperature starts heating up. October weather can be cool, but it’s not too cold yet.

During our first visit in May 2023, I expressed interest to the office staff that we would like to attend the balloon fiesta in October 2024. Coincidentally, there was a cancellation on our departure day for the October 2023 Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. We snagged the reservation immediately, even though the rates spiked during the event. Coronado Village is very close to the fiesta grounds.

October’s visit was spectacular, with balloons landing in the RV park, even right in front of our RV. The weather cooled quickly, requiring a heavy sweater by the end of the month. Early October was mild enough for just a light jacket, even for nighttime fiesta events, to which we rode our e-bikes.

A useful tip we’ve learned for saving money while traveling is to stay for a month when possible, as it often costs about the same as a two-week stay. This usually requires paying for electricity, but staying longer allows us to slow down and truly enjoy the area.

Thousand Trails Pacific City, Oregon

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Thousand Trails Pacific City, Oregon

Imagine a 180º view of the Pacific Ocean from a hill 200′ above the water. Well, imagine no more.

We spent eight days at Thousand Trails Pacific City across the street from McPhillips Beach, a vehicle beach in Pacific City, Oregon. That was the view out the back of our RV site.

This is a Thousand Trails (TT) park. If you don’t know TT, we’ll post more about it in the future. Essentially, TTs are campgrounds where anyone can stay for a nightly fee, or if you are a TT member, you can stay for free for up to 21 nights, depending on the type of membership you purchased. Most TTs are near the coast, Great Lakes region, or snowbird locations like Florida, Texas, and Arizona. There aren’t any TT parks in the center of the country.

This park is older but well-maintained, nestled amongst tall, mature evergreens, and has about 300 RV sites. Some sites are full hookups with 50-amp service, but most are 30-amp with only water and no sewer connection. All sites are back in; no pull-through sites. There are 12 or so tree-lined loops with sites spaced throughout. The campground is very hilly, and towing a large RV there is very challenging.  The video to the right begins as we leave check-in and ends when we get backed into our site. It was a slow 30-minute drive from the office to our site, then another 10 minutes to get backed into it.  To shorten the video, I’ve sped it up in places and edited out most of the time we spent pulled over, letting cars pass, or stopped trying to figure out how to negotiate the sharp or narrow turns.  Remember, we’re 60′ long, including the RV and truck, so we can’t take corners too sharply. We’re also 8′ wide, so two RVs can’t pass in opposite directions without someone pulling partially off the road. It was actually close to 45 minutes from the office to our site before editing the video.

We chose a site with a very steep incline at the front but a great view out the back. The truck wheels spun slightly while pushing the RV up the incline as it was so heavy, and the driveway was sand and gravel. Thankfully, Martin was the spotter and navigator; otherwise, I would not have been able to do it by myself. If you have a large rig and travel alone or aren’t confident and skilled behind the wheel, this might not be the park for you. Also, the Ford F-450’s minuscule turning radius, compared to large Chevys, Rams, F-250s, or F-350s, helped tremendously. No other 22′ vehicle has such a great turning radius!

The video above shows a lot of small rocks strewn on the road. There must have been a big storm before we arrived, as the stones had been swept away a day later. The roads in the park aren’t in great shape. Most are paved, but some are dirt or gravel in places, although we didn’t encounter any significant potholes.

TT does not assign you a specific space at check-in; you pick the site you want by driving around and choosing it upon arrival. You let the office know the site number after you’ve parked. At check-in, we were told there is a section, especially for rigs over 38′, near the park’s far end and up the hill. That section also has the best views in the park. We had to navigate sharp turns and narrow roads to get there. Fortunately, we knew the challenges before we arrived and weren’t surprised. It was also helpful that the office staff told us about this section.

We could have stayed at numerous sites throughout the campground. If we had driven around the loops for a while, we might have found a 50-amp site with sewer available, but we opted to go straight to the over 38′ section. This campground is relatively long, narrow, and parallel to the coast highway.

All loops are nicely landscaped and populated with giant fir and cedar trees, many of which are hundreds of years old. Several walking paths through the woods lead to other sections of the park. Penny and Little Bit loved their walks on the trails and roads within the park. They also enjoyed running on the beach, just a short walk across the highway and down a well-maintained trail.

The weather was perfect during our stay, with highs in the low to mid-60s, fog in the morning that usually dissipated by midday, and only light rain once.

Pacific City is tiny and caters to tourists and conventioneers willing to pay for overpriced restaurants. Not our vibe.  Cloverdale is also small but doesn’t seem to cater to anyone, with virtually no restaurants. Tillamook, about 45 minutes away, is rather shabby but has a few decent restaurants and microbreweries that feature Tillamook Cheese in one way or another. After failing to find several restaurants listed on Yelp, we enjoyed an excellent cheeseburger and local brew at Pelican Brewing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t stop at Tillamook Creamery to take the tour and have lunch as their restaurant’s menu was too limited.

Evergreen Coho SKP Park – Chimacum, WA

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Evergreen Coho SKP Park – Chimacum, WA

August 2024 was the first time we stayed at Evergreen Coho SKP Park in Chimacum, Washington, and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Chimacum is on Puget Sound’s west side and the Olympic Peninsula’s east side, about 10 miles south of Port Townsend. The weather was fantastic the entire month we were there. Although we only had one day of heavy rain, we had drizzle on several days, which made the temperature perfect. We only had one day when the temperature reached 80° Fahrenheit, and most days were in the 60s—perfect for me!

Chimacum is right on the edge of the Olympic Mountains rain shadow and only gets 29.5 inches of rain a year as opposed to Forks, Washington, just a few hours away, which gets nearly 119 inches of rain, and Mount Olympus, which is even closer and receives a whopping 220 inches a year.

No trip to the Olympic Peninsula is complete without a visit to the Olympic National Park.  Our visit can be found on our post, Olympic National Park and Port Angeles.

We also visited Port Townsend, where we had lunch at Sirens overlooking Puget Sound.  Port Townsend, a town of less than 10,000, is home to over 300 Victorian homes, many of which have been restored.  In the mid-1800s, town planners believed that Port Townsend would become the busiest port in Washington state.  They built for a large influx of people, but that dream came crashing down when Seattle was selected as the railroad hub.

Fort Worden Historical State Park is a short drive from Chimacum and overlooks Admiralty Inlet, the entrance to Puget Sound. Along with Fort Casey and Fort Flagler, Fort Worden was part of the “Triangle of Fire” defense system, designed to protect against sea invasions. The fort was named after Admiral John Worden, who commanded the ironclad warship, the U.S.S. Monitor, during the American Civil War’s Battle of Hampton Roads.  Fort Worden was featured heavily in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”

Evergreen Coho is an SKP Co-op where you can purchase a lifetime lease on an RV plot. This allows you to live there full-time with only an annual maintenance fee. As an Escapee member, we can stay at any Co-op park depending on availability without purchasing a lifetime lease.

Evergreen Coho has a very active social activity calendar.  While we were there, there was a pet parade, an ice cream social, and a nacho and margarita fundraiser to support the landscaping committee, and this didn’t include the crafting and committee meetings.

Our timing coincided with the plum harvest at the RV park, and we enjoyed several plums picked from the park’s colossal plum trees every day. The apples weren’t quite ripe yet.

Our favorite amenity in the park was the well-manicured walking trail through the moss-covered, shaded forest surrounding the park. Penny and Little Bit loved their multiple daily walks along the roughly half-mile, woodchip-covered path that nearly fully encircles the RV park.

While in the park, I utilized their well-stocked woodworking shop to drill holes in five copper busbars for the 48v, 300 amp-hour battery I’m building.  Unfortunately, I could not finish drilling all the holes, so I will have to finish them at a later stop.  There will be a later blog post on the entire project when I finish, likely around March 2025.

One afternoon, we rode our e-bikes through a nearby city park to Indian Island and Marrowstone Island. We intended to visit Kinny Point State Park, but following Google’s direction took us to a dead-end in a neighborhood, and we could not access the park. It turns out that Kinny Point State Park is only accessible via the water. One of the friendly residents of Marrowstone Island told us about the beautiful East Beach County Park about five miles north. This beach was about halfway up to the island’s north end. I didn’t find it that nice, as the beach was covered with smelly, fly-infested, rotting seaweed. It was a 20-mile bike ride, and we barely made it back to the RV park with any juice left in our e-bike batteries.

Riverbend RV Park & Cabins – Montrose, Colorado

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Riverbend RV Park & Cabins – Montrose, Colorado

Riverbend RV Park & Cabins was our home base when we visited Montrose, Colorado, in May 2024.

We had such a good time in Montrose. We went to a concert in Delta and a musical in Ridgeway with my cousin, her boyfriend, and my cousin’s friend. We visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the Colorado National Monument, the Ute Indian Museum, Montrose Botanic Gardens, relaxed next to the Uncompahgre River which our site backed onto, ate at numerous restaurants, fished in the river and nearby lake, road our e-bikes along a long bike path to Cerise Park and downtown, went to a raging waterfall at Box Cañon Falls Park & Nature Center you can stand near the foot of, and saw wildlife.

The Uncompahgre River is a tributary of the Colorado River. It’s not an especially large river, but it flows quickly and doesn’t have any significant rapids, at least where we were. Every day, we watched rafts taking fisherpeople down the river, numerous stand-up paddleboarders, and few kayakers being carried along by the current.

We explored the Crystal Dam area about 20 miles from Montrose with it’s spectacular outflow.

The Montrose Water Park (WSP) on the Uncompahgre river near downtown is used by swimmers, surfers, wakeboarders, stand-up paddleboarders, and kayakers. The waterpark also has a very challenging disc golf course along a steep hill.

I especially liked fishing in the small, stocked lake adjacent to the RV park. I caught a dozen or so small bluegills and a few trout. I released most of the fish except for the few that I smoked and ate. I opted for an annual Colorado Fishing license at $130/year because I would have needed to purchase multiple short term licenses.

Riverbend RV Park is a well-maintained by friendly staff and a quiet place to stay on the river. It has two small ponds, a nice fenced dog park, large shade trees, and a beautiful greenbelt. The dogs loved walking in the grass next to the river and watching the Canadian Geese families with their young goslings plunge into the fast-moving river. In spring, hanging baskets of flowers are hung from the trees and placed in planters throughout the park.

We thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Riverbend RV Park in Montrose.

Coronado Village RV Park – Albuquerque, New Mexico

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Coronado Village is one of our favorite RV parks. It is located in north Albuquerque, NM, close to I-25 and Paseo Del Norte Blvd NE. Although the park is very close to the freeway, it is so large (350 spaces) that you might not hear any freeway noise.

Our favorite feature of Coronado Village is its 7-acre grassy park in the southeast corner of the RV park. Depending on the season and weather, you may encounter a carpet of beautiful yellow dandelion blooms, a snow-dusted winter wonderland, or a treed greenbelt.

We stayed there twice: once in May 2023, when spring had just sprung, and again in October 2023 for the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. Spring is such a lovely time in the park. The greenbelt is covered with gorgeous yellow dandelion flowers and their seed heads, and the mulberry trees are sprouting new growth and dropping pollen everywhere. The weather is just beginning to get hot, but it’s not too hot yet.  The weather in October can be pretty cool, but it hasn’t turned bitter cold yet.

There isn’t anything within walking distance unless you want to walk a mile or two, but our two dogs love their walks on the greenbelt.  I’ll post drone footage of the dogs and us exploring the greenbelt as soon as possible.

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