Sugar River Forest Preserve

We stayed here to go to the races at Rockford Speedway. The campground was wooded providing nice shade but not great for solar production. The sites were a good size and offered good spacing between the sites, but did not provide any real privacy. We had to level our trailer side to side only slightly. The campground was fairly quiet when we were there in early May and was maybe 50% full. The light by the bathroom building was kind of obnoxious. We got 6 TV channels but they were mostly digitized and not really watchable. Maybe if you had a better antenna than the crappy one in our trailer you'd do better. We had two bars of Verizon LTE but it seemed somewhat unreliable. At the dump station the foot thing to open the sewer drain lid was broken so it had to be opened by hand. The sewer drain itself was very large so the usual elbow we use at every dump station didn't secure to the hole as usual however the drain was deep enough that the hose could be put down inside and no mess was made while draining. The rinse hose has no threads so you'll need something like water bandit if you want to use it with a hose to connect to a black tank flush. Overall the setting of this campground was nice and we'd stay here again.

North Central Illinois is not an area I'd typically be scouting out campsites but for various reasons I needed to pass through Rockford, IL. Using Campendium I found Winnebago County has several forest preserve campgrounds - Hononegah, Seward Bluffs and Sugar River but none were reviewed. We decided on Sugar River, although a bit anxious as it was a Friday afternoon of the weekend leading up to July 4th. But much to our relief, the hosts were right out and about and the campground was easily less than half full. These sites were spacious and many were nicely spread apart but with varying degrees of vegetation between them. Many were quite open with a scattering of tall pines. The campground is all electric (some 50 amp) with 70 sites on a big loop with a large central area inside the loop. Sites were both gravel and grass, some were wet and rutted due to all the rain, but most appeared level. The entire campground is well shaded. The hosts were very nice and helpful allowing us to pick our site and set up before registering. Cost is determined by residency (county or not) and age (senior or not) and electric or not. There wasn't much signage leading up to the entrance but there is only one road and it ends right at the park entrance. The campground is to the right. Down the hill is a dump station on the left and very nice tall water spigots are spread throughout the campground. There are trails and the river to explore. Some neighbors were playing country music - the hosts asked if that was a problem which was thoughtful - they would make sure it was off by 9:30. There was a strong US Cellular signal.