Barretts Pond holds a canoe on a shore with no inlet or outlet, pitch pine and scrub oak between the sand and the loop road. Charge, Curlew, and Fearing ponds keep the same kind of night, a packed-sand loop and a closed bowl of water. Together the four loops hold close to 400 sites in 12,400 acres of pine barrens.
The forest holds 58 kettle ponds, four of them with camp loops, and College Pond is the swimming bowl you do not camp on. You paddle the pond outside the van, or you swim at College Pond, and you stay inside Myles Standish State Forest either way.
You reserve a non-electric site before you roll in. Walk-in camping is not allowed, so the site comes first and the van comes second. A dump station is on the property, and you arrive with your own water and empty on the way out.
Camping runs early May through mid-October as of September 2026. Summer dates are worth booking early. If those loops are full, or you want water and electric at the pad, the other Plymouth night is on the canal at Scusset Beach.
Scusset Beach and the Cape Cod Canal
A tanker slides past the jetty at Scusset Beach State Reservation, close enough that the canal feels like a shipping lane at your feet. RV pads back up to the dune line along 1.5 miles of Cape Cod Bay. You sleep with the bay in front of the van and walk the jetty from the campground.
RV sites have water and 20/30/50-amp electric as of September 2026, with water shut off October through March, and those pads are the RV sites. Peak camping runs early April through late October. Mid-November weekends stay open for self-contained units only, with no restrooms, water hookups, or dump station in that window. If you need more sleeping space than a campervan bunk, Massachusetts RV rentals include larger rigs that use these full-hookup pads.
Once you are on the Cape itself, Nickerson State Park and Cape Cod National Seashore are a different overnight, and that trip is on Cape Cod campervan rentals.
Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Patuxet, and Thanksgiving week
Granite columns frame Plymouth Rock at the harbor's edge, and the Mayflower II's rigging stands behind it. More than a million people a year come through that waterfront, and the night is still a pond loop or a canal pad.
Plimoth Patuxet keeps living history running daily through the Sunday after Thanksgiving. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, America's Hometown Thanksgiving Parade starts at the Rock and draws hundreds of thousands of people to Plymouth Harbor.
Myles Standish has already closed for the season by then, so Thanksgiving week is a harbor day. Scusset's last self-contained mid-November weekends can land on that same Saturday, and they compete for the same vans and the same remaining pads.
From an open deck in the harbor you can watch a humpback breach off the stern, then you drive back to the pond loops for the night. Salem's oceanfront campground and Patriots or Marathon week belong with Boston campervan rentals. For the Berkshires and the rest of the state, use Massachusetts campervan rentals.