San Francisco North-Petaluma KOA

This place is a serious resort, which is why it is so expensive. But if you want to be in the Bay Area and want a ton of things to do at your campground, this is the place to stay. There is a pool and hot tub, kitchen area, animal petting area, rock climbing wall, jump pillow, playground, hay rides, and of course more activities for a fee (tie dye, etc). Wifi is great. The showers by the pool are great. The whole place is well landscaped and clean. The staff are helpful and courteous. They even come by and pump your tanks every morning if you aren't hooked up. There is a dump station if you need to dump before they come around in the morning.

Large, competently run KOA campground. Clean restrooms and showers (some of the best we've ever seen!). Very nice camp store--cleaner and better organized than your typical campground store. Inventory looked mostly new and fresh! Large selection of stuff.
Our only complaint would be the laundry facility. We think it's great that they are switching the campground to a cashless system, but the app-based approach they chose for the laundry machines sucked! Two pages of detailed instructions stuck on the wall for how to download, install, fund and then finally use the app instead of putting quarters or a credit card into the machine. But then the app didn't work! We asked for help at the front desk and the wonderful Amber came to our rescue. We were able to do the laundry because she used the app on her phone for us--so she paid for the machines for us! That's customer service above and beyond!
Amber told us they would be changing up the system for paying for the laundry machines in the near future. Good!

Great location as we were visiting friends nearby in Marin, and the washrooms and showers were wonderful. Yet I don’t know which I loathed more: the endless flies or the endless amount of small children telling their faces off and running around our RV at all hours. Quiet hours ostensibly end at 9AM yet we had kids yelling outside our door before 8 o’clock.

We stayed in site R237, which was level and enough room for our 38' motorhome plus toad. The campground was multilevel but they had leveled all the spots. Very nice campstore and lots of activities for kids. On the flip side it brings a lot of families with kids, therefore it is not a quiet and peaceful area, but that can change on any given day. We were here over the weekend. We did a day trip to the coast to Bodego Bay, very pretty drive! Short stay for us!

Overall, great experience. We don't normally stay at KOA's, but with a 10 year old son we decided it was high time he had a camping trip more geared to entertaining him. The amenities at this KOA are fabulous: petting zoo (only in the mornings can you go in with the goats), jumping pillow (available all the time), basketball hoop/small court, swimming pool and (small) hot tub, kamping kitchen area, large playground, wagon rides around the campground where everyone waves at each other (cute), corn hole, tie dye t-shirt making, movie night in a REALLY lovely sitting area with wine barrels, mining for kids, and so much more! There are two VERY impressive stores there as well (although I wish they carried liquid coffee creamer, lol). Checking in was effortless and most of the staff was very friendly (some younger staff seemed less than thrilled to be there). It IS expensive, and yes - overpriced for the actual site you get....BUT, who can honestly complain with all those amenities? Our son was thrilled overall. Something else to be noted about KOA's for those who might not consider this: since it is so family focused, it is certainly not quiet during the daytime...BUT, I couldn't believe how quiet it was at nighttime!!! You could hear a pin drop! So, for those older folks who miss their grandchildren far away, it might be worth the splurge to watch the kids having fun and enjoy peace and quiet in the evenings. Lastly, the setting is FABULOUS! You could see some cows and horses in the field from the H loop section! All in all, would definitely stay again!

Large end site advertised as full hookups, but it didn't have a sewer drain. A daily visit by a septic truck does NOT count as FHU. Ended up moving sites. Cramped park but cozy. Loads of kids and campfires. Smell was a bit too much at times. One of the only parks in the region where spots have spacing and isn't full of near-permanent residents, so it's an okay but expensive place to stay.

We stayed here overnight. You can tell as soon as you pull up in front of the office that this is a “destination” KOA: there were crowds of kids at the pool, on the jump pillow, and at the small petting zoo. Other campground amenities include a small rock wall (for climbing, I assume, I didn’t see it myself), a large playground, a bocce ball court, the typical enclosed KOA dog park, a convenience store, and a recreation hall with a large tented patio that served as a movie theater at night. And we were given a sheet of daily activities at check-in along with paper wristbands to wear if we wanted to participate. So if you have kids or simply want some entertainment out of your campground, this place fits the bill.

We like to pick KOAs for overnight stops when we can because usually KOAs, even the fancier ones, are easy to get into and out of. That wasn’t the case for us at this park. We picked our site (P211) online knowing only that it was long enough and had full hookups. But the interior roads we needed to take to get into our site were a bit narrow, and we had to be careful with maneuvering our 37-foot fifth wheel around the turns so we didn’t swipe any parked vehicles. Our site was in the “Vineyard Terrace” section, where (true to its name) the sites are terraced and our driver’s side neighbor site was four feet higher than ours on the other side of the fence. We had no trouble pulling into the site, but we made sure we positioned ourselves so we had enough room to open our slides. The site exited onto a single lane road, and right across the road was a deluxe cabin with a parking spot facing the road. The truck in that parking spot was out of the road, but its position would have made it hard to get out: fortunately we met the owner and he moved the truck out of the way before we left. Even so, we came close to hitting the fence of our down-slope neighbor with the RV on the way out.

Our second challenge getting out was avoiding the dump station, which sits in-between the two exit lanes. The designated exit road would have forced us to make a right turn into those exit lanes, and there was a real question about whether we could make that turn, so we went the wrong way down a (two lane wide) one way road that allowed for a straight approach to the exit. It seems like a bad design: anyone using that dump station ends up blocking one of those exit lanes, and I can’t imagine what happens when there’s a line to use that station.

All that said, we managed to get out without a scratch, and there were other large rigs in neighboring sites, so it’s just a matter of deciding if you’re up for the challenge or if you’d rather pick a different spot.

In terms of cell service, the best speed I got on my Verizon Jetpack with MIMO antenna during our stay was about18Mbps down and 15Mbps up, and we had no problem surfing the web or watching streaming video the next morning. The best speed I got with my AT&T phone showed 13Mbps down and 4 up.