We stayed at this Austin-area park from December 2019 until June 2020. We planned to leave at the end of April, but decided to wait to travel due to COVID-19. This was our first time visiting Austin, and we loved it. We found a couple great safe places to eat (see our reviews of Zucchini Kill and Always Hungry), the best co-op grocery store ever (the unfortunately named Wheatsville), the Dinosaur Park. Sadly, we never got to check out the Congress Avenue Bridge bats due to the pandemic and avoiding crowds, but there’s always next time.
Hwy 71 RV Park is located on the east side of Austin in the town of Cedar Creek. The nearest town with grocery stores and services (including a Buc-ee’s!) is Bastrop. There’s also Bastrop Mobile Home and RV Parts, which just opened this year and David used frequently for working on clients’ RVs in the area. (And he was BUSY!)
As for the RV park itself, we wanted to be close to the office so it’d be easier to do laundry and pick up packages. The downside is that there’s a lot of road noise: Highway 71 is the major road in and out of Austin on that side of the city, so it’s nonstop 70mph traffic all day and night.
The sites are fairly wide compared to other parks we’ve visited, and long enough to park our truck in front of our trailer without any trouble. We had full hookups with 50 amp service which was the case for most of the park, although there were smaller less-expensive sites with only 20 and 30 amp service.
The sites also don’t get much TLC. They mowed the grass each week, but all the sites (including ours) were littered with cigarette butts and bottle caps (among other things).
There are three “family bathrooms” (enormous rooms with a toilet and shower) at the front of the park. We checked them out but didn’t use them. They’re a bit dated, but clean. We did see a seat in one, but I wouldn’t call them “accessible.”
There is a pool, but we never got to use it– once the weather started warming up, the pandemic was in full swing, and the pool was closed. When the state started reopening, we hoped they would allow families to reserve a couple hours at a time so we could use the pool and maintain distancing, but they never did. About a week before we left, they fully opened the park, and no one using the pool seemed very interested in physical distancing or wearing masks.
The laundry rooms were a hodgepodge of different machines in varying states of repair. Usually at least one machine was out of service, but we only opted to go to a laundromat a couple of times because the laundry room was always open. They only take quarters, but there’s a quarter machine, which was always functional.
The office sold some snacks and sodas, and there’s a soda machine outside the laundry room, which was always stocked whenever we wanted a can of lemonade or something random.
There’s propane on site, but they charge by the tank, not by the amount dispensed. You also have to leave the tank with them to fill at some point during the day, and pick it up before they close or the next day. But check out their hilarious propane take:
A frustrating (and disgusting) drawback was that there’s a septic/leech field with a sprinkler system that ran almost daily, during the late afternoons, which made the air smell like sewage and left a thin sheen of leech field water on everything. So when the weather is finally nice enough for a walk around the park, you can’t go outside unless you want to smell black tank and get sprayed with (what we hoped was clean) water. This also made a great breeding ground for mosquitoes.
The owner of the park is also expanding to add a LOT more sites in the back of the park. This unfortunately meant some construction noise, but it was only unbearable a couple days. The expansion is understandable, but we wish they’d invest in park’s facilities and consider adding a hot tub, before they start adding more sites.
We had amazing T-mobile service. All the bars, at least 35mbps all the time. Bastrop had many dead zones, but at our park we always had great service. The park had WiFi, but it wasn’t great compared to the cell speeds and connection quality, so we never needed to use it.
In hindsight, this post sounds like a lot of negatives, but the park really wasn’t that bad. We were comfortable and safe, it was affordable at $555/mo plus electric, and the location was convenient to all the things we wanted to do and see in Austin.