Orange Beach and Gulf Shores share one long ribbon of white quartz sand, and a campervan week here is a parked one, not a driving loop. You pick your spot on the Gulf and stay. At Gulf State Park a wooden boardwalk lifts you over the dunes and sets you down among the umbrellas, while the campground sits about a mile and a half back on Middle Lake, shaded and inland rather than on the sand itself.
That campground is the first night: full-hookup paved pads with a connector path that runs straight onto the park's trails. It stays full all year and is tightest in summer, so reserve as early as you can. Sites open a year ahead, and thirteen months ahead for Alabama residents. A campervan sleeps two comfortably; if this is a family beach week, those same full-hookup pads take a larger RV just as easily.
The Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail
From the campground a paved connector, the 2.2-mile Campground Trail, joins the Backcountry Trail's 28-plus miles of pavement winding through the park. It runs under live oaks draped in Spanish moss, past gopher tortoises crossing at their own speed and alligators sunning along the lake edges. It is flat and shaded and built for bikes, which is the easy way to cover the distance.
The park beaches, from Cotton Bayou to Gulf Place
Away from the campground, the park keeps a line of day-use beach accesses on the Orange Beach side: Cotton Bayou, Alabama Point East, Romar, and Shell Beach, all off Perdido Beach Boulevard. Any of them drops you onto the same wide sand with fewer people than the main pavilions.
Across in Gulf Shores, Gulf Place is the livelier public beach, the one with the bars, the volleyball nets, and the watersports rentals. It is also the shrimp festival grounds: on the second full weekend of October, October 8 to 11 in 2026, the National Shrimp Festival draws close to 250,000 people and fills every bed in the area, so aim your dates around it or straight through it.
For a day trip with some history, Fort Morgan holds the far tip of the peninsula, a brick star fort at the mouth of Mobile Bay with the Gulf on one side and the bay on the other. It sits 22 miles west of Highway 59, and its only camping is reserved for Scout troops, so it is an out-and-back and you sleep at the park.
The rest of Alabama's campervan trips head inland, and the Alabama hub rounds them up.