Getting the van, and getting out of town
Costa Mesa is Orange County, not Los Angeles, and a van trip planned as an LA trip starts badly. John Wayne Airport (SNA) is about six miles away and is the only commercial airport in the county, which makes it the sensible arrival point. It also runs a strict noise curfew that bans departures between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., so there is no late flight to catch after an evening drop-off.
The first local problem to solve is where the van sits when it is not at a campground. Costa Mesa's code prohibits using city streets to park or store a large motor vehicle, defined as more than 22 feet long or both more than 84 inches wide and more than 84 inches tall, with a narrow 48-hour exception for residents preparing a vehicle next to their own property. Oversized vehicles cannot get residential parking permits, and any vehicle is capped at 72 consecutive hours on a public street. Newport Beach excludes the same dimensions from its permits. Sleeping in the van on a residential street is not a plan here.
The coast is the actual draw
Most good trips from Costa Mesa run south along the water, and the sites people want are California state beaches booked through ReserveCalifornia. Reservations open on a rolling six-month window, with the date exactly six months out released at 8 a.m. Pacific each morning. These parks are not in the state's reservation drawing program, so summer weekends are a straight race the moment the window opens.
What is genuinely within an hour:
- Crystal Cove, Moro Campground: terraced bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway, 28 sites with water and electric hookups for rigs to roughly 38 feet, and shorter non-hookup sites where the limit varies by pad.
- Bolsa Chica State Beach: a row of sites right at the sand, but the park requires factory-built self-contained RVs and its rules exclude conversions and cassette toilets, which disqualifies a fair number of rental vans.
- Doheny State Beach, Dana Point: dry camping with no hookups at the sites, plus potable water and a dump station.
- San Clemente State Beach: hookup sites in the family campground.
- San Onofre State Beach: San Mateo has hookup sites a short distance inland; the Bluffs are no-hookup sites along old Highway 101 above the beach.
There is no boondocking backstop, so the apps that find free sites will not help you here. Dispersed camping in the Trabuco Ranger District of Cleveland National Forest is confined to the San Mateo Canyon Wilderness and needs a permit, and you cannot take a vehicle into wilderness. When the beaches sell out, the fallback is a private park such as Newport Dunes on Back Bay Drive, which has full hookups with 30- and 50-amp service, not a free pullout.
Trips worth more than one night
San Diego is about 90 miles south on I-5 and works as a two-night run. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is roughly 126 miles and close to three hours to Borrego Springs; its wildflowers usually run from late February into early April and peak around mid-March, but the bloom depends entirely on winter rain, so a dry winter means no show. Joshua Tree is about two and a half hours east in clear traffic and is a cool-season trip. No campground inside that park has hookups, only Black Rock and Cottonwood have potable water and a dump station, and Indian Cove, Jumbo Rocks, Ryan, Hidden Valley, Belle and White Tank have no water at all. Reservable sites there open on Recreation.gov six months out.
Two driving notes for the southbound runs. The 73 leaves I-405 in Costa Mesa free as far as MacArthur Boulevard, then becomes a toll road that is entirely electronic with no cash booths, so settle with the van's owner how tolls are handled before you use it. And the Ortega Highway (SR-74) over the Santa Ana Mountains is narrow with sharp curves and steep grades, manageable in a short van but a poor place to learn a long-wheelbase one.
Timing the trip
From mid-July into mid-August the OC Fair runs at the Orange County Fair and Event Center in Costa Mesa itself, which adds traffic and local demand. The Event Center's own campground is first-come, first-served with no reservations, and its sites carry water and sewer with electric capped at 20 amps, low enough that running air conditioning is not permitted. It also closes for long blocks around the fair and other events, so it is not something to build a trip around. May and June deliver the marine layer and gray coastal mornings that usually burn off by early afternoon. September through November is the most reliable window on the coast, and it is also when the desert becomes usable again.