Avoid at all costs. I literally had to sleep with one eye open every night. My family had come to Willowpoint a few years back. At the time, I thought the place was not the greatest, but now I look back and realize that was definitely this area's golden time. When we were last here, the tiny town had cute shops and lots of people, a bustling dock loading people every few minutes, and the camp area was filled with campers. Flash forward 4 years later and this place is a ghost town. Literally. Most of the shops were vacant and out of business. The marina had no swimmers, barely any people out on the water, and we were the only campers in the area. Oh wait, there was also a tent full of hobo's a few spots over that I'm sure lived there...So yeah we were the only actual CAMPERS THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE SITE. Oh man. So let's go day by day.
Friday: Arrive at Willowpoint. You don't have to checkin anywhere, just go to your designated spot, then the managers will come find you later. We set up camp, lakeside, with broken tables covered in bird poop and just useless and dirty. So if you avoid my advice about not going here, then do yourself a favor and bring a table cloth. We checked out the bathrooms and no surprise - no toilet paper. All weekend long. There was no toilet paper. 4 stalls, 2 of them with broken toilets, the 3rd one had a turd streak on it, and the 4th one with a broken lock. The broken lock toilet was really the only option we had but no way were any of us setting our bottoms on that dirty thing. But seriously, who knows how long that streak of turd had really been on the toilet, it was there the entire weekend we stayed. Second of all someone had left a disturbing gruesome threatening letter on the table. It made everything scarier and it really showed the environment of this camp (keep in mind, this is not only a camp, it is an RV park as well). Night time comes along and the hobo's in the tent start to argue and cuss and scream and fight and seriously where is the management at this place!?!?!?
Saturday: We walk over to the marina to checkout jet ski's and boats and paddle boards. The abandon building says the main office is somewhere else, but there are still hours on the building that said they would open at 11. We waited a few hours till 11, come back, ask the guy if we could rent some things, and he says we have to go to their off-site office to go rent it. And we pointed out the hours and he didn't even know that the hours were wrong. *que infinite eye rolls.* Anyway, we get in our cars to inconveniently drive somewhere else to rent a jet ski and paddle boards. I feel like this really hurts the business and is an overall inconvenience.
After jetsking we went back to camp to find that the people in the other tent had begun fighting. AGAIN. But this time was intense, with even louder full blown out yelling and screams and pushing, and eventually the cops came. 3 cop cars and 1 cop truck along with a fire fighters and whatnot. At this point you would think management would come out to see the scene. But nope. You would think any acknowledgment from management would happen but nope. The police and fire fighters left, with no progress to the situation, the fighting people still in their place, continuing to fight. At this point, I was not only mad at the camping "resort" but also just at the structure of this town.
Later that night, around 1am, some people decided to put up a tent right next to mine, in OUR designated space. How frightening is it to wake up in an unfamiliar place with voices you do not know who they belong to and headlights shining through your tent!? These rando's slept there for a few hours then ended up packing their things to leave once sunrise came. This place has no regulation of who comes in. If people are coming in to sleep for free, why should we have to pay?
Sunday: Woke up, brushed my teeth in the bathrooms, still looking at turd streaked toilets, and no toilet paper or seat covers. Still dealing with people fighting and bird poop covered tables and seats. Even the chairs and tables set out near the office that look nice from afar are actually not usable because they are covered in a mess of cobwebs and more bird poop. I get it, you can't control natural animal feces. What you can control is if you decide to clean it though. You can't control the actions of people who stay in the camping area. What you can control is whether or not you would let these people stay though. These are all conditions as to what drove people away and I can now see why this place was completely empty when we went. read more