The family campground at Blackwell Forest Preserve sits in a wooded loop off Butterfield Road in Warrenville. Each site is a gravel pad with a fire ring and a picnic table, cut into the trees, some more open than others. The loop is wooded enough that night is a fire ring under cover, and morning walks start at the campground fence and keep going through the preserve. Hikers, bikers, and riders share those paths, and the campground sits on that network so the first walk of the day begins at the site.
Family camping is open Friday and Saturday nights from May through Columbus Day weekend, with extra nights around some holidays, so you arrive Friday and leave Sunday. Reserve the pad first, then the van. DuPage Forest Preserve District family camping books online through ActiveNet up to a year ahead and needs at least three business days of notice. Stays cap at two nights, and a night is $25 for DuPage residents and $40 for everyone else, as of September 2026.
You plug into electric and haul water from the fill station on site. There is no water or sewer at the pad, and a dump station on the property covers the tanks, a setup that fits a campervan. If you need more sleeping space than a van gives you, Illinois RV rentals are the size-up.
Blackwell Forest Preserve keeps more than seven miles of trail on the property. The paths keep going after the last campsite, so Saturday you walk out from the site and come back to the same pad without moving the van. Once the Friday-Saturday season closes, there is no public campground near Naperville that sleeps a van, and midweek nights in season are closed too.
The day out from Blackwell is the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, a collection of trees and plants with no camping on the grounds. It sits next to Naperville, so you walk the collections at midday and come back to the fire ring. Fermilab's bison herd in Batavia grazes open prairie beside the main road. You see them from that road only, with no public walk-up into the pasture.
Starved Rock and the Lake Michigan shore
The canyon overnight is Starved Rock from Joliet, west on I-80. Sleep there if the Illinois River canyons are the point of the week.
The lake night is Illinois Beach State Park from Chicago, and the dunes trip crosses the state line from there.
The Illinois campervan hub covers the rest of the state.