Clermont sits on rolling sandhills west of Orlando, high ground by Florida standards, where the roads climb and the lakes drop away below them. Lake Louisa State Park has the quietest stretch of that country, and its campground is up between two of the park lakes, Dixie and Hammond. You wake up in pine and palmetto with water on either side of you. Get one of those sites before you get the van, because 60 pads is the park's entire overnight capacity and the van is the half of the trip that can still move.
Those two lakes are why you stay a few days instead of one night. Both are shallow and calm, and the hour after sunrise is the one worth an alarm, with the surface flat, mist still coming off it and nobody else out on the water. Fishing off the piers keeps the same hours.
The rest of the morning goes to the sandhill country in between, which is dry, open, sandy walking under pine and scrub oak. It looks more like south Georgia than like anything people picture when you say you are camping near Orlando, and that is most of the appeal.
Winter is the easy season, dry and mild, and it is when central Florida campgrounds are busiest. In summer you flip the day around: water first thing, shade and a fan by noon, and a thunderstorm that turns up most afternoons whether or not you planned for it.
Camping between Dixie and Hammond
There are 60 full-facility sites laid out between the two lakes, with a dump station between the Dixie and Sandhill loops and two accessible fishing piers on the water, according to Florida State Parks as of August 2026. Full facility means water and power at the site, which is what lets the air conditioning run through an August night.
That is the whole reason to put the van here rather than in a lot closer to the parks. You are paying attention to the lakes and the light, not to how long the walk to the shuttle is.
Those 60 sites all go through the Florida State Parks reservation system, and there is no second campground in Clermont to fall back on when they go.
Lake Minneola and the Clermont waterfront
Downtown Clermont runs downhill to Lake Minneola, and the town beach at Waterfront Park is at the bottom of it. The South Lake Trail follows the shoreline there, so you can ride or walk the waterfront, swim, eat downtown, and still be back at the van well before dark.
Nobody camps on Minneola, so the day ends back at Lake Louisa either way. The hills you drove in on are also why road cyclists come out from Orlando all winter, and early on a weekend morning you will pass groups of them on the county roads between the lakes.
If the parks are the actual point of the trip, run it from Orlando instead. Clermont is the base you pick when you want to be on the water, and the Florida hub has the coast towns if you want to pair the lakes with a beach week.