Easterlin Park is 46.6 acres of old cypress in the middle of Oakland Park, and the thing you notice pulling in is how much darker it is than the street you just left. Some of those trees are 250 years old and go up about 100 feet, which is why Broward County has the place flagged as a Designated Urban Wilderness Area. The campground sits underneath them.
Broward lists 45 full hook-up RV sites under those trees, the closest county campground to downtown Fort Lauderdale and open every month of the year. Get one before you get the van. The county does not take campground reservations through a booking site, so a site here is a call or an email to the park office and then a wait for the answer. Rental dates bend around a confirmed pad, and a park office holding 45 of them does not bend around a rental.
The year-round part is the whole argument for hookups in South Florida. A shaded site plus shore power is an air conditioner running all night in August, and without it a van in Broward in late summer is a sweatbox by two in the morning. Winter is the easy season and the one everybody else wants, so the sites go earlier from January through March.
Evenings at camp are the disc golf course through the hammock and the loop trail around the water, and then the bugs find you. Dusk under a hammock this old means mosquitoes and no-see-ums, and screens plus a fan handle both better than any spray does.
Fort Lauderdale Beach and Hugh Taylor Birch
The beach is a day out from camp, not a place to leave the van overnight. Hugh Taylor Birch State Park holds the shaded end of the strip, a stretch of hammock and trails with the ocean directly across A1A, and it is the one green thing on a beachfront that is otherwise hotels. Its camping is closed to the public and reserved for organized youth groups, so the pattern is simple. Drive over in the morning, swim, walk the loop under the trees when the sun gets mean, and come back inland to sleep.
Park the van with some thought. A high-roof camper does not clear the height bars on most downtown and beachfront garages, so the realistic options are the surface lots and the metered spaces along the beach, and both of those fill on a warm weekend well before lunch.
Markham Park in Sunrise
Markham Park is out west where Sunrise stops and the water conservation areas start, flat and open in a way Easterlin is not. You trade the cypress shade for room, and there is a lot of room: 88 full hook-up RV sites, plus the only Broward campground that also takes tents, which matters when half the group is not sleeping in the van. Call it first when Easterlin has nothing.
It is also the better base if the plan involves getting outside all day rather than driving to the coast, since the park backs onto conservation land instead of a neighborhood.
T.Y. Park down in Hollywood is the third option, another 61 full hook-up sites, and it is worth a phone call on a holiday weekend when the first two are gone.
South to Miami, north to West Palm Beach
The Everglades run is a Miami trip, and the campgrounds people use for it sit down there. North of Broward, West Palm Beach has its own county and state parks within an easy morning's drive, and the rest of Florida is worth a look before you set the route.