El Reno West KOA

We stayed here for one night while traveling west on I-40. The campground is right off of I-40 (so yeah, there's road noise). To reach it, you need to drive through a parking lot containing a gas station, the Cherokee Trading Post souvenir shop, and the Cherokee restaurant. Arrows painted on the asphalt guide you to the entrance road, which goes by a fenced enclosure containing a couple of bison, and then past the two KOA dog parks before you end up turning left to pull up to the office.

All of the full hookup pull-through sites are located in two rows in front of the office. All of them have asphalt pads and narrow grass lawns with a picnic table. There’s not a lot of space between sites: we parked on the left side of our site, and when another RV ended up parked on that side, our RVs were aligned such that they only had about 9 inches of space between the end of their steps and one of our slides. We had a few sewer connection options at our site (69), but the tops were all broken: we ended up just sticking the elbow at the end of our hose into the hole, which worked okay. The power and water hookups were at the front of the site. These pull-through sites are level and fully open to the sky: some of the W/E pull-through and back-in sites located along the other roads in the park looked like they got some shade from nearby trees, but I didn’t have time to check them out.

There are plenty of grass areas to walk dogs, but some of them have burrs, so for us it was simpler to just walk the gravel path to the dog parks, which seemed to be burr-free. Both dog runs, which share a fence line, have airlock-style gates and are lit by overhead lights at night. Both also have shaded park bench seating for the humans and a decent view of the bison enclosure.

In terms of cell service, the Verizon signal was decent but the network was congested: the download speed never got above 0.4 Mbps during the afternoon and evening (on a Friday). The next morning, before 6am, I saw speeds of 14Mbps down and 9 up with my hotspot with MIMO antenna. The best speed I got on my AT&T smartphone during the day Friday was 17Mbps down and 3 up. I did try the campground Wifi: it was better than the Friday Verizon connection, but not by much.

We were too tired to make our way to the Cherokee restaurant, but if we had, we could have showed them our KOA receipt to get 10% off our meal. Maybe the next time we’re passing through the area.

Much much better that most KOA’s.. The owner has had this place for over 50 years! It has easy pull throughs that are very close to each other but it also has a very nice river side area with trees. It’s a pretty park. Check in was fast and access was easy. You hear the highway but you can expect that from a koa journey. I am pleasantly surprised for a journey as it can be a weekend getaway for some if you are in the riverside.

I can’t speak to all of the other amenities that may exist in the summer but we pulled in when it was 10 degrees and snowy so:
Pros -
nice warm, clean bathrooms
Empty (lol)
Surprisingly quiet considering it’s a stones throw from highway 40
Safe
Lots of level spots

Cons-
I can’t really think of any. It was great for what is was, a one night stay…maybe spotty cell phone service. 2 bars LTE which really felt like 3G service)