How camping season is looking for campgrounds

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -With the early start to spring, many people are itching to start camping. Megan Cole recently spoke with two campgrounds who are optimistic about the upcoming season.

Soon, this campground will be filled with people. Clare Ardnt, owner of Ardnt’s Aroostook River lodge, says that they’re booking up fast.

“The month of July is booking up very fast. People are coming for the potato blossom festival, people are coming for the balloon fest in August. What I don’t have is many people coming for class reunion or family reunions it seems those may still be cancelled.”

“We’re getting some reservations they’re coming in pretty steady. We’ve got some seasonal all booked up and yeah you know every few days we get some more people coming in, definitely a lot more than last season but again we were only open a month.”

Ardnt says that last year, she primarily saw people from Maine, but this year, she’s getting a lot of reservations from people out of state.

“We’ve had a lot of out of staters calling. A lot of people who are what they call full time rvers who are been traveling around the country and decided to tour New England this summer and I’m surprised we got people from California, people from Texas, a lot of people from Florida are coming.”

“We have out of staters that are booking their trips, hoping that they can get to Canada. We’ve had a couple that have had to cancel because they knew the border wasn’t open so they wouldn’t be able to go and do what they really wanted to do but even in staters, they’re traveling they wanna get out and enjoy doing something fun.”

Jacob Pelkey, tourism developer for Aroostook county tourism, says they are also getting inquiries about other events.

“We’re going into the 2021 summer. We do expect a lot of the events from 2019 to come back and so we’re expecting more weekend events and festivals. We do think the events will be scaled back in terms of what they’re offering the public it’ll probably be a safer impact to work in the framework of the moving maine forward plan which still mandates 6 foot COVID-19 distancing but it will bring a lot of activities back to the region.”

Ardnt and Barnard say that they’re excited to welcome back familiar faces and to show first time visitors what the County has to offer. Campgrounds will be opening in May.

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