Cuyahoga Valley National Park is close enough to Cleveland that people drive out for an afternoon, 22 miles and about half an hour down to the visitor center at Peninsula, and it costs nothing to enter on any day of the year. What it will not do is let you sleep there. The Park Service permits no camping in the park at all, backcountry included, and staying overnight in a parking lot is out too, which shapes a van trip here more than anything else does.
The Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath is what the day goes to instead, twenty miles of flat crushed limestone inside the park, open around the clock, and the scenic railroad will stop for riders and bikes and run them back one way so nobody has to pedal both directions. The lake is the other half of the city and gets underrated, with the Metroparks ringing Cleveland with river valleys and lakefront beaches, fishing piers and swimming inside the city limits. In town it is the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame down on the water, the West Side Market in Ohio City for the cheap dinner before you drive out, the art museum in University Circle, which is free, and Little Italy for the food.
So the first night is outside the park, at one of the ordinary, comfortable campgrounds that ring the valley. Showers and dump stations, not wilderness. Punderson is the easy one to like, a state park campground looking over its own lake with 137 electric sites, full hook-ups, showerhouses and a dump station, and a camp office that rents kayaks and bikes to whoever turned up without either. The Park Service measures it from the park visitor center rather than from Cleveland, 36.9 miles and about 40 minutes. Those full hook-up pitches are sized for something a lot longer than a van, so a party that needs more beds can book the same campground with an RV rental in Cleveland.
The other cities in the state are on our Ohio campervan rentals page, and every number here was checked in August 2026. The trip people leave the valley for goes west and finishes on a boat.
Getting the van across to Kelleys Island
Kelleys Island is the largest American island in Lake Erie and the one part of a Cleveland trip that does not look like Ohio. Limestone shore, water in every direction, and a ferry dock at Marblehead where the van drives onto the boat instead of staying behind in a lot. The ferry line puts the crossing at about thirty minutes, just over three miles dock to dock.
Kelleys Island State Park has the north shore, with camping along the water, a boat ramp and a public kayak launch, and the glacial grooves, a slab of bare limestone that a glacier dragged its load across, a short walk from the campground. The campground runs 43 sites without power, 46 with, and 35 on full hook-ups, and it keeps camping open through the winter. Settle the boat before anything else, though. What a van costs to put on the deck, and whether anything about it counts as oversized, is the ferry line's answer to give, so ask before you drive out there.
Festival camping at Nelson Ledges Quarry Park
Nelson Ledges Quarry Park is a private campground in Garrettsville built around a spring-fed quarry, and it has been doing this since 1972. Ten or more music festivals run there every summer across 850-odd campsites, and camping comes with every multi-day festival ticket, which is what turns a show into a weekend rather than a long drive home at one in the morning. The quarry itself is open for swimming from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and that is most of the reason people stay the extra night.