Chickahominy Riverfront Park

Overview

Nine days into our stay, Chippokes State Park is going to kick us out of our campsite to pave campground loop B. We booked the site a year in advance, and they gave us two weeks notice to find something new during Memorial Day week. This is completely unreasonable. They offered us the “reasonable” compensation of a 30-Amp (not 50-Amp) site too short for our RV and cars on a loop that we could not safely drive around. Buy hey, they were going to let us use it for free!

Apparently, they management changed a few years ago, and the current manager does not seem to care about the campground. The campground has been declining. It used to have three festivals, and now it has none. The trees are not trimmed back to allow larger RVs to safely drive through. Maybe he cares about the historical plantation in the park, but probably not.

Also, it is not on the better side of the James River, so we will not be staying here again. That means we have to search for other places to stay. There were a lot of local parks down near Newport News that were poorly maintained with short sites and trees encroaching. The two best options appeared to be Chicahominy Riverfront Park (a James City County Virginia Park, no that is not a mistake) and Machicomoco State Park. The riverfront park is better located for seeing people in Williamsburg and Newport News, about the same for Norfolk, and a little worse for Suffolk.

Directions

Instead of turning at Hopewell/Highway 10, the route needs to go further north to go around the end of the James River. The directions need to be verified with the truck route map, but the route to the campground would be:

(18.5 miles) Continue another on I-295N around Richmond
(1.9 miles) Take exit 28 to the service road to exits for Highway 60 and I-64. Pass the exits for Highway 60 and take the first exit for I-64 East to Norfolk.
(32.3 miles) Take I-64E to exit 234 for Highway 199 to Lightfoot (Humelsine Parkway)
(6.0 miles) Take Highway 199 to the exit for Highway 321 / Monticello Avenue
(3.7 miles) Highway 321 / Monitcello Avenue will become John Tyler Highway / Highway 5
(2.9 miles) Continue on Highway 5. The Chicahominy Riverfront Park is on the right immediately before the bridge

The route is fairly clear of overhanging trees until the last few miles. The road is wide enough that it should be possible to avoid them, if traffic is light. We did see some maintenance of the trees on the drive to the park.

Amenities

The campground website is here, and you can see a campground map here (Note: If you click the “here” link, you will have to go back to this page.) The park has some good features:

A decent sized functioning pool
A paved bike trail along Highway 5
On a peninsula along the Chicahominy river and Gordon creek
A pier and boat ramp
Canoe rentals
Quiet
A nice bathroom #1 with a slop sink
75′ back-in gravel sites with water and 50-Amp
Some gravel sites versus all grass and dirt
Sites have fire rings
Price is no worse than Chippokes State Park
They might have Wood Ducks part of the year.

It had some drawbacks too:

No laundry
A lot of speed bumps
A bathroom #2, that smelled like #2, with a slop sink
The showers have a group changing area, not a private changing area
All the full hookup sites were short and under the trees
Starlink will need to be 40′ behind the RV to avoid trees

Internet

We should have functional Starlink, but if we could not get the site we wanted, we might have to supplement it with cellular data. AT&T was tested for 5G, and it reverted to LTE (4G).

Provider	Protocol	Device	Down (Mbps)	Up (Mbps)	Latency (ms)
T-Mobile	LTE	phone	35	2.5	53
AT&T	LTE	phone	106	10	64
AT&T	LTE	phone	122	20	24
AT&T	LTE	phone	121	10	64

Sites

Some of the sites claim 30 amps on the website, but we tested the 50-amp plug at those sites. Our plug-in tester said it was wired correctly, but simple testers cannot tell whether it is true 50-amp or a 30-amp connected to a 50-amp plug. The lady behind the desk thought that any site with a 50-amp plug-in should be 50-amp capable, but she did not seem like she really knew. Assuming they have 50-Amp service, our site preference, in order, is 180, 193 (30 amp), 148 (30 amp), 190.

Site 180 (50-Amp)

This site should be easy to get into because of the road across the street. It should also have (nearly) unobstructed Starlink. It will have little to no shade. The site is about 75′ by 16′.