Rent a van in Alabama and you're probably headed to one of two trips that barely overlap. One is the Gulf, where you back into a full-hookup pad and hardly touch the keys for a week. The other is the ridge country up north, all hardwood bluffs and canyon rims, where driving the loop is the point.
I-65 is the spine of both. The coast sits at its southern end, the ridges up toward the Tennessee border, and the state's busiest parks a short hop off the interstate in the middle. Which trip you're on usually comes down to where you pick up, and the Gulf pulls the biggest crowds by a wide margin.
The Gulf Coast
The trip on the coast is a wooden boardwalk that climbs the dunes and drops you onto packed white quartz sand, a line of rented umbrellas running down toward the water. You rent the van, you park it, and the beach is the week. A lot of the local outfits will just deliver a trailer and set it up on a pad for you, but driving your own van keeps the smaller, quieter beach accesses down the peninsula within reach.
Gulf State Park is the base. Its traditional campground sits on Middle Lake about a mile and a half back from the sand, where 496 improved pads run from roughly 45-foot back-ins to 65-foot pull-throughs on full hookups, and a late arrival after the 5:30 p.m. office close gets a gate code by email. Those long, full-service pads are why a family settling in for the week often sizes up from a van to a full RV.
Book the campground through reserve.alapark.com. It opens for monthly stays only from November through March; the rest of the year is nightly or weekly.
Between beach days, a paved multi-use trail runs for miles under live oaks and Spanish moss, flat enough to pedal straight from the campsite. One thing to budget for: the park charges trailers and large RVs 35 dollars for all-day beach parking at the Pavilion and Pier as of August 2026, and neither lot allows overnight camping.
Orange Beach is the starting city for the coast, and the Orange Beach campervan lander goes deeper on Fort Morgan, the back bays, and the quieter beach accesses. Come in summer and you get the heat and a full campground; the sand is the whole trip either way.
North Alabama
North of the fall line the state climbs into hardwood ridges and the tail end of the Appalachians. A week up here is a driving loop more than a base camp: a bluff hike above Huntsville one morning, a canyon rim on Lookout Mountain the next, the van moving most days.
Monte Sano State Park sits on the hardwood bluff directly over Huntsville and makes the natural first night. Its improved loop has water-and-electric and full-hookup sites, while the primitive loop is tent-only, so a van books the improved side. One routing note that matters here: skip the GPS for the final climb and keep a rig off Bankhead Parkway, and come in on I-565 to Governors Drive, then up Monte Sano Boulevard.
Huntsville is the starting city, and the Huntsville campervan lander lays out the whole loop, Monte Sano, Lake Guntersville, and the Little River Canyon rim, with the drives between them.
Central Alabama
The middle of the state is the hinge on I-65, the ride you fit in on the way to or from Birmingham. Oak Mountain State Park is the reason to stop: the largest park in the system, with an IMBA Epic mountain-bike loop on the Red Trail and King's Chair, a rock perch out on the Double Oak ridge, as the payoff hike.
The campground sits on Beaver Lake and stays open year-round on 30- and 50-amp hookups. One quirk to plan around: the north gate closes at sunset, so a late arrival uses the south gate. Birmingham is the starting city, and the Birmingham campervan lander covers Oak Mountain and the Wind Creek weekend on Lake Martin.
Two side trips break east on I-20. Talladega Superspeedway turns its infield into a temporary city of rigs on the two NASCAR Cup weekends each spring and fall, with Cheaha State Park, the highest point in Alabama, just past it; the Talladega campervan lander has both. Farther south, Chewacla State Park fills on Auburn football weekends and anchors the college-town trip on the Auburn campervan lander.