When we were leaving the Lebanon KOA Holiday on Salmon Falls, we asked the typical question of the kids, “What were your favorite things?“and “What did you love about the trip? “
This resort immediately came up as a place my children didn’t want to leave and would love to return to stay. At first, they thought they might get bored, but there was always something to do.
The Lebanon KOA Holiday on Salmon Falls is located on the border of New Hampshire and Maine. This location was great for visiting towns like Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Kittery, Maine. There were many supermarkets and big box stores around in case you needed supplies. We also enjoyed breakfast, dinner, and ice cream at some local restaurants. If you didn’t want to leave the campground, the main store had everything you might have forgotten-even ice cream!. The resort also has planned themed weekends to keep things fun and interesting.
This KOA provides various lodging options, and we stayed in a deluxe cabin with two bedrooms, a full bath, kitchen, combined dining, and living room area. It has a cute screened-in porch and a deck built on right next to a grill as well as a fire pit. So right out of the gate, it is basically set up for glamping if you’re not used to camping.
The resort provided tons of amenities. Some highlights were the high ropes course and the mini-golf. Our kids loved the many playgrounds and the jumping pad. They have two pools but in the highlight is that one of the pools has the oldest waterslide in Maine that weaves back-and-forth through the side of the hill. This feature alone helped make it a destination in itself.
But the most prominent feature was probably the most loved. The river itself was literally in the backyard. I know we use that phrase right in your backyard to indicate something pretty darn nearby, but no, this was out the door and 7 feet forward.
It was the most natural lazy river that I’ve ever seen. I could walk alongside it, and the kids were right there. They could climb in on one end in their inner tubes and then ride along the river to the other end. At that point, they would run with her tubes to the beginning and ride their way back. It was an unbelievably safe experience because the camp bordered the left bank of the river, so if there was ever an issue, the kids could scream help, and 50 campers would come running.
Safety was one of my biggest concerns that were immediately squashed. We erroneously thought that we lost one of the kids. How this situation was handled spoke volumes about the campground staff. Without a second thought, the entire team mobilized and covered the whole campground in minutes; all-terrain vehicles, golf carts, and even others on bicycles were recruited.
I think that incident tells you what makes the campground special. Many campgrounds provide those essential services of a place to sleep and a place to roast marshmallows over a fire. There are not as many campgrounds that have the energy of wanting to help so quickly and so rapidly.