De Soto State Park

The website warns you not to use GPS to find the park. We recommend you follow the directions given on the DeSoto Park website as there is another road that goes to the park that is not big rig friendly.

We arrived on a Wednesday. When you reach the country store there is a place on the right to park. The store is closed Tuesday and Wednesday and there is a sign right there that provides a phone number to call. You just need to call and give your name. You will be provided with the security gate password. When the store is open you can go down and pick up your DeSoto State Park map. The store has snacks, souvenirs and some camping/hiking supplies. Also near the store is a laundry room and a Nature Center. The Nature Center is great for kids.

We had a pull-thru site. The site itself was steep. There isn't a lot of privacy either with this site. Due to the time of year (March) the leaves were not on the trees so we felt a little more exposed. The position of our fire ring was also close to the neighbors site. If we had to do this again we would reserve a back-in site. There are many sites at this park that offered more privacy. We booked this site 2 months ahead and due to the number of days we were staying we didn't have a lot of sites to choose from. Our site was next to comfort station 1. We didn't check out the bathrooms, but there are vending machines and a small laundry room. The laundry room has 2 washers and 1 dryer ($1.50 a load). One of the dryers was out of order. During our stay here we never had any issues getting in to do laundry. There is also laundry in the other comfort station (we didn't check this one out). The laundry down by the store offers more washers and dryers.

The cell coverage was spotty at times. We had a lot of cloudy/rainy days during our stay which we think contributed to this. We have Verizon and with our booster we had 2 bars of 4G. Wi-Fi is offered here and was very good. The only time we had some issues was on the weekends when the campground would fill up and one of the weeks the kids were on school vacation, so it got bogged down a little bit. We were able to steam movies on Netflix with almost no issues.

There are lots of hiking trails around the campground, which we enjoyed. We saw many birds and deer on our walks. Amenities are close in Fort Wayne. We highly recommend making a trip over to Mentone and eating at Wildflower Café. The food was delicious! There is a restaurant at the park, but we didn't try.

The campground offers primitive camping. We walked up to that area and would definitely recommend if you tent camp. There is a vault toilet and the sites looked very nice. It seemed very peaceful.

Overall we were very pleased with our stay here and would definitely recommend. The only thing we would change is the site we chose. Great place to stay!

Clean open sites. Fast wifi. Clean climate controlled bath house. Cable TV ( did not watch). July temps and humidity were awesome up there.