Flandrau State Park — Attraction in New Ulm

Early Spring 2024, weekend. We loved this state park campground. We booked a drive in electric for our travel trailer.

Like most states parks the drive in sites have electric but not water or septic. They also have drive in sites with no hookups.

Each site had a terrific fire pit with attached grill (see pic) but they are not movable.

The picnic tables with benches are seriously huge. Each could easily sit 8 to 10 adults.

The firewood available to purchase at the park office are similarly serious huge. Easily two to three times the size of the bundles at the big box stores for about the same price ($8). A single bubble lasted us all night.

The campground is located right at the edge of New Ulm. As in, the entrance is off a residential city street. It's super convenient for walking or biking into town to do the usual tourist-y things.

They have showers and flushies but they weren't open yet (last week in Apr, they open the first weekend in May) but there is a vault toilet if you don't want to use the one in your camper.

As always in MN, you can only book 120 days in advance so set a reminder on your phone if you have a particular weekend in mind because the sites do book up very quickly.

Two things we'd like to see improved.

Be prepared to level your camper or motorhome. Every site we looked at was unlevel side to side and front to back. Some were off by 6" or more, which is more than a typical rocker leveler can compensate for. We had to put a couple of boards down and use the rocker leveler on top, which is janky af.

Most sites could use a dump truck of gravel. It was very rainy and our site and our friend's site were both mostly black mud. There was barely enough gravel to keep the wheels from sinking in too far, although they did sink in...

Great state park. I really liked how it felt like you were out in the middle of nowhere despite essentially being a part of the city of New Ulm. That in itself brings about a unique camping experience with Schell's brewery (and thus brewery tour) there and lots of other unique opportunities in town. Flaundrau used to be the only state park that had a golf course and I'm not sure if that is still the case since I heard varying reports stating that part of the park the DNR split off and sold to the city. Regardless of whom owns it, there's a nice golf course right there connected to the park. I had a lot of fun fishing for catfish on both the Cottonwood and Minnesota rivers, with the former right there and easily accessible by the swimming pond---which is hands down the best feature in a gem of a state park. It was my first time to Flandrau and certainly won't be my last! Oh, the staff were extremely friendly and helpful as well. In short, there wasn't really any way left for the park to exceed my expectations more...

In the past couple Years I have explored so many places now in Minnesota with our camper, This year was our first time Visiting New Ulm. I understand why it is on the map, the town is timeless and charming we camped at the State park the sites were not too close but then also were not to far away as we had family in sites next to ours so we didn't have to travel to far from site to site. We went in may and the bathrooms were well kept and the hiking was pretty alot of birds and it was fun to hike along the river and the sandy flats to play in, though being from central MN we don't have these "Black Gnats" and those were alarming as both the girls had giant pools of blood behind their ears from their bites nothing I had seen before but read an article afterwards about them getting worse in past years especially around rivers. none the less we will be...