Campground Review: Nickle Lake

With many, many camping trips planned this summer with our new-to-us camper, I've decided to keep track of our favourites and not so favourites.

First stop - Nickle Lake (two minutes outside of Weyburn, SK)
Length of stay - One week
Weather - Cloudy and rain with one day of sun
Campers - 9 in two sites (5 adults, 4 kids)

Privacy
The campground was seriously lacking in privacy as there are minimal trees (if any) separating campsites. The oddest moment of the trip for me was when I opened up my blinds and found a man at the next campsite over staring at me through my window from his lawn chair. I quickly shut the blinds and kept them that way for the remainder of the week. Creepy!! It was ideal to have minimal privacy separating our campsite from the other in our group, but a little privacy is needed between neighbouring sites regardless.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Amenities
Nickle Lake boasts lake swimming, kiddie splash pool, boating, fishing, mini golf, parks and ball diamonds. They also have a cafe on the beach for a welcome treat. (Unfortunately for us, the cafe doesn't open until July and as we were camping in late-June it was not an option for us. Boy, were we disappointed!) We also picked a very rainy week to go camping and were not able to spend much time at any of these locations. The kiddie splash pool was also not open for the season yet and the park at that specific spot is in desperate need of a makeover. The fishing and boating dock as well as the sandy beach were beautiful and I wish we'd had more sunny days so we could have enjoyed them more.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Campsites
They were unexpectedly long and provided ample room for campers, tents, boats, vehicles, etc. They were also all grass. Having an all grass campsite seemed odd at first as most are gravel, but it was a pleasant surprise since the week we chose to go camping found us soaked with rain.  Gravel campsites would have left us, and especially our dog, soaked with mud, but Nickle just left us wet. At least we were able to stay clean in all the rain. An added bonus was that Jasper was still crawling and the grass did not leave his knees full of cuts and scrapes. I also appreciated that the fire pit was moveable. We were able to rearrange its location based on the wind and rain of the day.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Bathroom/Showers
We were steps away from the showers (which were free), but we found the fan inside to be extremely loud and one shower didn't work. It wasn't a factor though as it was a very quiet week and we were usually the only ones in there at one time.That being said, they were not cleaned very well.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars


Overall we had a nice trip to Nickle Lake. It was nice to stay close to home and I appreciated being at a regional campground because they are smaller in size and you can bike or walk to every amenity. We will definitely consider camping here again - and we will hope for better weather!

Melanie