Saturday, June 10, 2017

Meadows RV Park and Ketchum

While we were in Ketchum, we stayed at the Meadows RV Park.  If you’re going to stay in an RV park in the area, this is what there is.

Here’s the good.  It’s a nice location.  We’re close to Ketchum, but not in the foo-foo part of town.  There is a direct connection to the Wood River Trail.  The trail is a beautiful thing, it goes from Hailey to Hulen Meadows.  As it passes through Ketchum, there are stop signs, but overall, it’s just lovely.

Power is good, water pressure is good.  We had 4 bars of Verizon 4G, although some days it was like watching paint dry.  Laundry is ok, there are 3 washers and 3 dryers.  No data on restrooms or showers.  Our site was fairly level, we could have gone without doing anything to level.

It was not busy while we were here.

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The bad is that the sites are side by sides.  We were on site 34 which is a good one.  No one parks on our door side.  The Lifestyle on our driver’s side has to share his patch of grass with the door side of another RV.  The WORST part of the park layout is the location of the sewers.  We faced ID75, and our sewer was at the back of the site.  The sewer for the site sharing our power pole is in the front of that site (because the two sewers are next to each other).  If we were on the site where the Lifestyle is, I don’t think we own enough hose to reach the sewer. 

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Here you can see the side by side configuration.

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This problem is specific to site 34 and our RV.  See that thing in the middle of the photo? I don’t know what it is, but 34 is the only site that has one of these.  Notice the location of the hose bib.  We had to move pretty far to the right of the site in order to open the storage bays on the big slide.  If you don’t have this slide/bay door configuration, it’s not an issue.

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Ketchum is expensive.  If you’re coming here, shop somewhere else first.  I offer into evidence the following.  Here is olive oil in the Village Market in Ketchum.  $19.99 for 750 ml.

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Here is the exact same product in the Hailey Albertson’s.  $11.99 on sale for 750 ml.  Hailey is more expensive than Tucson, but the Village Market is just ridiculous.  It can’t be blamed on transportation costs, since the two towns are only separated by eleven miles.  By the way, we really like this olive oil.

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We saw this list of brands carried by one of the boutiques in Ketchum.  Nothing says disposable income like this list of names.

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Atkinson’s Market is a very nice upscale grocery store, also in Ketchum.  They have a huge wine selection, and more soup that we’ve ever seen in a grocery store.  They also carry fresh food for the beloved pet dogs.

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Real estate prices are high.  Ketchum is already seeing problems with teachers, nurses and service industry people not being able to live where they work.  Hiring is becoming difficult because of this.  Ketchum has land upon which they could build affordable housing, but instead they choose to convert the land to parking lots.  The local paper is fairly up in arms about this state of affairs.

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We liked Ketchum.  Since we do not boondock due to our inability to manage water usage, we would come back to this RV park, if and only if we could get a site with the sewer in the back of the site.  If you’re coming in the spring or early summer, please make a note of how much snow fell during the winter as that will determine what’s under water and what’s not.

4 comments:

  1. That RV park was nearly full every time we passed by there last August. The good thing about the Ketchum area is that there are tons of boondocking options and a number of forest service campgrounds not far from town if you can live without hookups. The problem with waiting until later in the summer to visit is that you risk dealing with smoke from wildfires. We almost had to leave early because of that. And we did all of our shopping at Albertson's in Hailey. Not inexpensive, but a whole lot cheaper than the ones in Ketchum.
    Don't know if you've heard of this, but it takes place every July in Sun Valley. We've never been invited ;-)
    https://thebossmagazine.com/5-things-know-sun-valley-conference/

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  2. Oh, I remember WheelingIt doing a review of this RV park now that you show the side-to-side sites. I absolutely hate that configuration! No privacy whatsoever unless the park is fairly empty. You were lucky not to have someone at your door side, even with the weird pole thing. Interesting about the prices -- thanks for the good intel! Definitely a place we'd want to shop on the way somewhere cheaper.

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    1. And we'd probably stay in a national forest campground. I'd rather boondock than have to share my patio area with strangers. Shiver!

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  3. I hate those sites too!

    When in that area in 2012 we stayed at a small RV park down in Bellvue...nothing special, but it did not have those icky sites where your neighbors patio is also your patio.

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