Chewacla State Park is where Auburn goes to get outside, 696 acres of pine, water, and trail on the south edge of town. The waterfall is the reason most people come, a wide drop over an old dam that you reach on foot down the Deer Rub trail, gneiss boulders and a grade steep enough to feel on the way back. At the center is a 26-acre lake with a roped swimming area and a high-dive, and the campground sits close enough to reach any of it on foot.
Those same slopes hold Auburn's mountain biking. The local IMBA chapter, CAMP, cut and keeps the trail system, and its showpiece, the NORBA National Trail, still traces the 1988 course from the first NORBA National run east of the Mississippi. Everything is multi-use, so you'll cross hikers on the descents, and the mellow CAMP loop hugs the campground for an evening lap.
There's no ramp and no gas motors on the lake, so the water belongs to carry-in kayaks, canoes, and paddleboards. Up the bank, an arched stone bridge crosses Moore's Mill Creek near a row of cabins the Civilian Conservation Corps built in the 1930s, still rentable if a van isn't the whole plan. This is Auburn's in-town base, and for anyone renting a van it's the obvious first night among Alabama's campervan rental cities.
Camping at Chewacla
Two loops sit above the lake with 36 full-hookup sites between them, taking campervans up to 60 feet on gravel pads wired for 30- and 50-amp service, each loop with its own temperature-controlled bathhouse. The same pads take a full-size rig, so if a van is smaller than your group needs, an RV rental in Auburn fits the same sites.
Fall is the one stretch when Chewacla books out. Auburn's home football schedule runs September through November, and game weekends carry a two-night Friday-to-Saturday minimum with non-refundable, non-transferable sites locked to the date you reserve. Call the park at 334-887-5621 to set one up; any other weekend it's an ordinary two-night hold you can cancel with 72 hours' notice.
Lake Martin and Callaway Gardens
For open water, locals head to Lake Martin, a 39,180-acre Tallapoosa reservoir with 700 miles of shoreline and a fishing-tournament calendar to match; from Auburn it's a day on the water you drive back from, and the camping side of it sits up the same US-280 on the Birmingham campervan page. Across the Georgia line, Callaway Gardens at Pine Mountain is the other easy day drive, worth a wander through the grounds before you point the van back to Chewacla for the night.