Kansas City West-Lawrence KOA

One of the nicer Journey KOAs, I've visited. Clean, neat, facilities in good repair. Freeway and train are nearby but earplugs solve that problem. You will be offered earplugs at check in. The sites were level enough, roomy enough. I saw lots of ants everywhere but I had no trouble with them. I really liked that there is a self-service car wash nearby that my trailer fit through. Good ATT 5G signal.

Off-season price, really nice staff, proximity to family we wanted to visit and not a ton of people, plus the dog park next to our site made this a five-star stop. I would guess my review would be totally different in a couple of months, but for an overnight stop in March to see a cousin who lives nearby it was perfect. Oh yeah, and the obligatory KOA train tracks not far away.

My one request for all the parks with off-leash dog areas....please consider artificial turf so our two German Shepherds can play without getting wet or muddy. It also makes cleanup much easier for poop (we have it in our backyard in Colorado!). MAYBE our fellow dog guardians would then pick up their dog's poop, too!!! Doubtful, but maybe.

We’ve stayed at many KOA’s at this point, but this one has the closest pull-thru sites we’ve ever experienced. The strips of grass are about 8’? Basically you’ve got 12” of grass on either side of your picnic table placed longways. Almost felt like I could lean back and use the RV next to me as backrest. Stayed here on a cross-country trip and only did 2 nights so we could see the WWI museum but if I hadn’t reserved in advance we would’ve found another campground for tonight :(

We have stayed here 3 separate times for periods of a couple months or more over the last 4 years as we used to live in Lawrence before we started traveling and come back regularly to visit. It was a Jellystone when we first stayed and has since become KOA. There is train and highway noise but we got used to it after a few days.

Pros:
The long term people are pretty friendly and quiet.
Really close to downtown Lawrence.
They've remodeled the bathrooms and they're cleaned daily.

Cons:
The owner decided our rig was too old (after we had already arrived - and there were no rules on rig age!) and we needed to make changes in order to stay (even though we weren't planning to stay longer term (more than a couple more months) but manager's communication was vague and we still felt like we could have been asked to leave at anytime (especially stressful as we were about to have our baby).

There were a lot of really inconvenient things we were asked to accommodate (while they conducted tree removal for example) but communication was poor and overall we left with a really awful taste in our mouth about this place. We will NOT be staying here again. Or at any other KOAs.

We stayed here for a weekend just to get our new trailer out before winterizing.

Pros: They had a large jumping pillow and playground for kids. This kept them entertained for hours! Staff were nice. They led us directly to the site and delivered the fire wood we purchased. The site we reserved had a water leak so they upgraded our reservation to full hook-ups no extra cost. Close to downtown Lawrence.

Cons: Noisy- close to the highway and train tracks. At night, I think the train went by at least hourly. Wi-fi crawled- forget about loading websites with pictures. Sites are _extremely_ close together. It wasn't full when we were there but I cannot even imagine staying there if the place was full. Not much nature to be found. Kids could ride their bikes around the campground but there was no place to go on a family bike ride. In order to bike to downtown Lawrence, we'd have to ride on a busy road that doesn't even have a shoulder let alone a sidewalk or bike trail. There were a lot of people that stayed there long-term- trailers with trash bags full of leaves around the bottom for insulation, some even have fences. Bathrooms stunk and were very dated.

We had T-mobile LTE service.