Dubois/Treasure Lake Holiday KOA & Punxatawney, PA (and it’s cute little groundhog)

Our goal in traveling is to not spend our days with 6 hours of driving. It’s too much sitting. It’s not exploring. And we are in no rush, except to outrun the snow. When we wanted to get to the Niagara area over to Hershey, PA it was going to be too long of a ride. We toyed with going over to Erie and spending a couple of nights. Then we looked at a spot in Ohio. Instead, we decided to drive just about due South from Buffalo to a KOA campground in Dubois, PA. It was just over a 3-hour ride through the hills of New York and Pennsylvania.

We had done our research on the KOA website as well as on YouTube and knew that this particular campground was in a gated community. It sure was. Once you arrive and go through the security gate of the community, it is about another 6 miles into the community before you arrive at the KOA. You aren’t going to stumble upon this one on accident!

We were greeted by a very friendly staff who helped answer any questions we had and drew on the campground map of where our site was. We were in site 1260 which was a pull-through site. There were some cabins for rent near the check-in station, but then the drive to the rest of the sites was another mile plus. Talk about remote.

There were several different areas of the campground. The middle of the campground was where all the pull-through sites that we were in, pretty much in a big field. The sites were nice and big and we had plenty of room between us and the next site. Tucked into some other areas around the outside of the grounds were seasonal sites with many campers who looked like they had been there for years. Many of these had golf carts at them as well as many permanent-looking items. These were also sites where there weren’t cars as the season was probably over for them.

There was another section of the campground further up than our section that was wooded and had pretty run-down picnic tables, concrete slabs, etc. I would have to guess that these are no longer rented out as they were pretty rough, however, maybe they are saved for a last resort.

It rained all but the last night that we were at this KOA so we can’t say we did a whole lot to write about. There was a pool that was closed for the season, a playground, a basketball court, and a volleyball net. We rode around quite a bit between rain showers on our bikes so did learned the paths of the campground. Luckily the last night it stopped raining and we got to see the beauty the campground had.

Plus, we were now in Pennsylvania, so we got to add our new sticker to the back of the camper! Check out our video adding it here. It’s so much fun to pick out songs to go with these sticker-adding videos. It’s exciting to see them getting added in. Next week we get to add Maryland as we explore the DC area!

In deciding on the Pennsylvania Polka song that we used for that, we were reminded that that song was in the movie Groundhog Day – sparking an idea! We visited Punxatawney, PA since it was about 50 minutes from the campground. We packed our raincoats, umbrellas, and lunch and headed there.

I found on Trip Advisor an audio tour to do while we were there. Here is the one we did.

We weren’t quite prepared in that I only bought one copy so we all had to listen to it on my phone speaker. It wasn’t loud enough to account for all the road traffic. Had we had multiple headphones maybe this would have worked better. However, it was a great little tour of this town. The narrator tells you when to walk, explaining things along the way. We got to see many of the Phil statues around the town, as well as the hotel that Bill Murray stayed at when he came to town to research for the movie back in the 90s. It was neat to see! Check out these sights!

We took the next 10-minute drive to Gobbler’s Knob too to see where the groundhog actually sees his shadow or not every February. Cool to see and the way we’ve been there! I’d say we are all happy to say we were there now and not in February when it’s freezing and there are 40,000 people in attendance.

Despite the rain, while we were in Dubois/Treasure Lake, we still had an enjoyable time. We spent more time inside the camper than usual playing games and watching movies (we had to watch Groundhog Day with the kids), but it was a nice few days. This campground is remote so it was good for just laying low and relaxing. I would recommend this campground, but suggest that you go to get a pull-through site like we had. Much more spacious and roomy than some of the alternatives.