The night you land, sleep at Living Forest Oceanside on Maki Road, a year-round park on the water just south of the harbour. Reserve a specific site rather than a site type, and if you are arriving on one of the long weekends between Easter and Thanksgiving, count on a three-night minimum. That gets the first evening settled before you point west in the morning.
The west-coast night is Green Point, the only campground in the Long Beach Unit, on a bluff above kilometres of pale sand. It is Parks Canada, open May 1 through 12 October 2026 with stays capped at seven consecutive nights, and summer weekends go early enough that you book the site first and the van second. Nothing else sits on that beach if it fills.
The drive is about three and a half hours by Parks Canada's count, north on Highway 19 and then west on Highway 4 out of Parksville. You go through Parksville to reach the junction, and the beach town is worth its own overnight at Parksville campervan rentals. Halfway across, Highway 4 runs straight through Cathedral Grove, where 800-year Douglas firs stand right off the road, one of them more than nine metres around. It is day-use only, so you stop, walk the loops, and drive on.
If Green Point is booked out, Sproat Lake near Port Alberni keeps two unserviced loops as the Highway 4 overflow, and it sits on the way rather than off it. Travelling with more people than a van sleeps, you can size up on Nanaimo RV rentals. The west coast stays wet even in July, so pack for fog and rain on the beach whatever the forecast says in town.
The harbour headlands and Saysutshun
With a spare morning, walk the headlands. Neck Point drops to pebble coves under arbutus and Garry oak, and Pipers Lagoon runs out along an isthmus to a rocky point, with Shack Island's cabins showing at low tide. Out in the harbour, Saysutshun (Newcastle Island) is sandstone cliffs and sunny pocket beaches, reached by a foot-passenger ferry from Maffeo Sutton, so the van stays in town.
If you would rather point south than west, Sooke and the Juan de Fuca coast are the Victoria trip, at Victoria campervan rentals.
