Lake Casitas Camping

About 3 years ago, we bought a tent, sleeping bags, stuff like that.  Last weekend we finally got around to using them. We went to Lake Casitas, which we chose because it had a water park.  The water park was closed, but we went there anyway.  It's a long time since we'd been camping, and never with kiddies, so we took John and Frauke and Muriel and Madeline to show us what to do.

It's a vast campsite, or really network of campsites, labelled from A (Angler) to O (Osprey).  We stayed at Creekside (C).   Although the creek seemed to be dried up.   In the UK when you book a campsite, they show you a field (at least in my experience), in the US, you get a very specific place - when we booked we were told we'd got spaces 4 and 5.  Space 5 was about three times bigger than space 4. It was kind of near a road, which kept some people awake too. Map below shows (about) where spaces 4 and 5 are.


View Lake Casitas, Campsite C in a larger map


Walking around the campsite, we realized the best space (if there was just one group of you) was number 18 - it was set further back from the road, and had its own private drive (well, sort of). The campsite had a playground, and the toilets weren't too unpleasant - they were sort of flushing, but were like aeroplane toilets where you press a lever to open a slot, so everything falls through, then some water trickles through. It was well worth walking to the real toilets, which were about 10 minutes walk away (and had showers).

Here's Susanne having breakfast:


And here are the kiddies walking back from the playground:



Susanne hadn't spent quite so much time outside in all her life, and asked when the fun was going to begin, on more than one occasion.

We hired a surrey - I had no idea that those bike things with 3 wheels and lots of seats were called surreys (and I was born in Surrey).  Amazingly, it took one of them to hold all 8 of us:
.

There was a boat hire place too, there was a great deal of debate and confusion about what kind of boat to hire, and for how long. The price list had a large boat, which held 8 of us, on the price list at $170 for 5 hours. But we didn't want a boat for 5 hours, 'cos we'd all get bored. Smaller boats (kayaks, canoes, rowing boats) were hirable for an hour, but there was reluctance by some people to go on some of them (and in the case of the kayaks, almost everyone but me; I thought it would be character building). After lots of shouting, the people at the hire place said that the larger boat was also available for an hour, so we got that.

I forgot to take a photo of the boat, but they called it a patio boat - it was like a big flat platform with an outboard motor, and some plastic chairs scattered about on it. And a steering wheel. Here's Frauke:



An hour was enough time to go all the way around the lake and see all the exciting sights. There's an airport for remote control planes. You can tell it's not for real planes, because it's got an X at each end of the runway, so you should not try to land on it.  Presumably you know that if you actually fly real planes.  Or if you didn't, you do now and can thank me.


View Lake Casitas, Campsite C in a larger map


Look really closely, and you can see a plane on this picture:



What? You can't see it? Hold on.  I'll zoom in.





The lake is used for drinking water, so you're not allowed to swim in it, and you're not allowed to let your dog swim in it, and you're really, really not allowed to pee in it.  To discourage this, there are floating restrooms:

This (people who know more about such stuff than me tell me) is a turkey vulture, and it's eating a fish.