Hagerstown / Antietam Battlefield KOA Holiday — Hotel in Halfway

I will start with the positives. The campground is cute. Had some adorable animals to see and pet. They have a couple of goats, some chickens and ducks. They have a little mining area that you can buy bags of sand and crystals in the store to use. They have a very nice general store. They also serve ice cream and coffee. The location is nice. It is right along a creek that can be used for a plethora of things: fishing, kayaking and tubing. The bathroom facilities were decent. However, the road to the campground from the main road is narrow and bumpy. There were some small issues with the bathrooms that I will write about here as well. The campground employees are very nice. No one seemed like they didn’t like their jobs. It is decently located. It’s a smaller campground which some may like. They do have activities like movies, a small swimming pool, a nice craft room. They have a nice children’s play area. It includes a large jumping area and swings with slides. |As for the negatives, there weren’t many but I was very upset by one of them. I had booked online 8/24 for a long Labor Day weekend: Friday to Monday. We had our small trailer packed to tent camp. My boyfriend and I love to tent camp. When I arrived to check in Friday around one, I went in and gave my name and the site I had booked online. I booked a tent site with a deck that had lights etc.. The lady at the desk looked up my reservation and told me that not what I had booked. I said to her that indeed it was and I picked that site because of its size. She again said that’s not the site I booked. I pulled up my reservation receipt and showed her. She made a phone call to I think the manager and told me that there was a glitch in the system and that site was no longer available. Of course I was upset because I had tried to book at a couple of other KOAs in the area and they were already full. She came back and told me she can either give me a regular tent site or a small cabin at the price we booked. I will mention, it was quite expensive already for the weekend. Each night was around $88 and I think it was $246 total for the three nights. Very expensive. The regular tent site are very small and are very cramped. So we went with the cabin. There are three cabins that sit right behind the office and that’s where we ended up. We were in cabin 11. We were both very disappointed but decided to go with it because we didn’t want it to ruin our weekend. The cabin is basic. Heat/AC (which didn’t cool the cabin down until the evening) and electricity. We were right next to someone who is seasonal. They had three vehicles. There was also a large black and orange truck there so it made backing/pulling in extremely difficult because we had to share the area with two other vehicles because there are three cabins there in that area. Their site was also not kept very well. They did have a cute doggie though. The overflow parking lot is so small and is shared with the campgrounds golf carts etc.. The cabin soffett was infested with wasps. My boyfriend is highly allergic to wasps so he went and bought a can of wasp spray. We didn’t see any the rest of the evening. The next day, we woke up to a wasp in our cabin. I went to the general store to let them know and the lady working said that her sister had just stayed there very recently and there were no issues. She also said she couldn’t do anything because we were in there. I said there wasn’t a need to because we had sprayed but the situation should be taken care of for future guests. I don’t see why they couldn’t have come and sprayed even though we were there. The bathroom next to the restaurant had an awful odor coming from them off and on. We could also smell it in our cabin from time to time. The have a very nice restaurant on site. We went to get breakfast at 815 Saturday morning and almost every table was dirty. They open around 8 I think. |Overall, it’s not a bad campground. I don’t think it was worth the almost $90 a night. I personally wouldn’t come back to camp there. I’ve stayed at several KOAs and this one was my least favorite. If you make a reservation here, I suggest calling ahead of time before you arrive to...

This is one of my favorite campgrounds ever. There's so much to do for both kids and adults, yet it still manages to be quiet and peaceful. Not only that, most of the staff were friendly, helpful, and seemed genuinely happy to be there.

Everything we touched was clean and relatively modern. The lighting and decor in the bathrooms was soft and relaxing, and the showers were hot, spacious, and had good water pressure (unlike 99% of the campgrounds we've stayed in in recent years).

Our RV site was large and (mostly) easy to back in to, although the site we were in on our first stay, which was close to the playground and next to the pavilion, was easier to park in than the river side site on our second visit.

This campground is great for families and couples of all ages. Our 7 year old son loved the clean, well maintained playground (with lots of shade nearby!) and the jumping pad (basically an open air bouncy house without the sides & top). He also enjoyed playing checkers and Connect Four on the GIANT game sets behind the diner. (There's an abnormally large checkers set on the wooden deck in front of the bathrooms and near the gazebo, but there is a truly HUMONGOUS set on the pool side of the diner. If you stay here, you must check it out!)

There is also a sparkling clean swimming pool and beautiful landscaped walking paths between and around everything.

I really liked the landscaping throughout the campground and the beautiful butterfly gardens next to the playground. Also, there are, like, 15 huge, healthy hanging spider plants in front of the diner & office that are the biggest, healthiest spider plants I have ever seen. I really want to know what they feed those things!

One of our favorite parts of the campground was the small farm near the main buildings. There are free-range chickens wandering around the area and nearby campsites - on our first visit, one of the hens had several fluffy little chicks following behind her! - and several goats inside the enclosure. There were also two friendly campground cats, one of which came right up to greet us as we were setting up camp the first night.

The only negative thing I can say about either of our visits is that the free wifi was always overloaded with traffic and rarely useable. It was even worse at the river side site where the signal seemed to be too weak to do much more than briefly show up on the AP list on either of our devices. I could sometimes connect, but the signal would drop almost immediately. However, this is pretty common with most free wifi networks, especially when there's a lot of people trying to use it all at once.

At the end of our stay we were sad to leave, but we hope to be back...

High two, low three stars:||Pros:|Site clean, no trash|Diner on site|Can charge items to site|Easy on and off I-70 and close to US 40|Clean bathrooms|Friendly staff|Cons:||Lots of bugs. Yes, we’re in nature. However, they had a wasp problem that was told to us only at check-in. Claimed they couldn’t control it. However, we sprayed Cutter around our site, swatted the wasps that were inside (amusingly, there was a provided fly swatter) and we never had wasps after the first hour or two. A friend at another site plugged in their bug zapper.||Plenty of things broken which again we weren’t told until we checked in. One was all the washing machines (not their fault, this was weather related.) Another was the gem mining. Both this and the wasps would have warranted an email.||Lots of weeds, not an inviting campground. Gaga ball pit had weeds and dirt so kid didn’t play there.||Men’s bathroom by diner is divided into shower only, with a separate men’s bathroom with a toilet and sink. So if you need to do anything other than take a shower, either go to the other bathroom or use the unisex bathroom (women’s bathroom by diner has both.) FWIW, the unisex bathrooms have better water pressure and easier to maintain hot water.||Basketball consisted of a small concrete pad and one hoop. More importantly, it’s on the road that’s by check in, so not kid friendly.||Happy there's a double sink to do dishes in the laundry room. However, the gray water drains not underneath but is carried in a pipe toward a basin and drain on the floor - which because it is gray water, smells.||Overall, campground has the potential to be a good, inviting, family place. However, it seems that anything new or any fixes are random – like Tent Site T1 having a newer deck with a picnic table while other cabins look shabby. The cabins on a hill (next to the gem mining) are pretty much unusable. There’s a staircase to access them, and then a slight incline to get to the front door. The cabin closest to Site 69 has its porch entrance facing the hill, which again is on an incline. Not family friendly, not something I want to attempt in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.||We enjoyed our stay here, and we didn’t have any problems (aside from the wasps, which we took care of ourselves.) However, most likely this is a one and done...