Your first night out of San Jose is Graham Hill Campground, over Highway 17 in the pine and oak above Henry Cowell. Book the site before you book the van, because the sites are the half that runs out. If you want water and electric, hold a site at Mt Madonna instead and go south over Hecker Pass.
The grove is why you came over the hill, 40 acres of old-growth coast redwoods where the tallest tree runs about 277 feet and roughly 1,500 years. You sleep two miles off in pine and oak rather than under the giants.
Graham Hill has no hookups and no dump, which State Parks confirms, and the closest state-park dump is New Brighton down on the coast. Mt Madonna's RV sites have electricity and water, with a dump on Valley View Road through Santa Clara County Parks. Get there on US-101 south, then Highway 152 west over the pass.
Big Basin is worth a day inside that same drive. It's California's oldest state park, and the 2020 CZU fire burned nearly the whole property, yet most of the ancient redwoods lived. The Redwood Loop runs past blackened trunks more than 50 feet around with green shoots pushing straight out of the char. Campgrounds are still closed and oversized vehicles can't use the day-use lot as of August 2026, so reserve a parking spot, bring a smaller van, and sleep back at Graham Hill or Mt Madonna.
Henry W. Coe State Park
East of Morgan Hill the country flips from redwood shade to open ridge. Coe is the largest state park in Northern California, and the drive-in campground at Coe Ranch sits at 2,600 feet with canyons dropping toward the valley. After a wet winter the slopes fill with blue lupine and California poppies into May. By summer the creeks are dry and the ridge bakes past 90 degrees, so go in spring and carry your own water.
The road and the rig decide the rest. The last 10 miles of East Dunne Avenue are narrow and winding, and Coe Ranch caps vehicles at 22 feet with no hookups. If you need more length or sleeping space than that, RV rentals out of San Jose go bigger, though the same road still applies. Book Coe Ranch on ReserveCalifornia, since it fills Saturdays and many Fridays through spring and holiday weekends.
New Brighton State Beach
Cross back over the ridge and New Brighton is the beach weekend rather than the first night. It's a forested bluff above Monterey Bay just past Capitola, with wooden stairs down to a sand crescent, and it stays one of the busiest beachfront campgrounds on this coast. Take Highway 1 to the Park Avenue exit.
Only 11 sites have hookups, numbered 46 through 56, and those are electric only. The dump station runs 10 dollars on top of the site, not included in the price. Summer mornings blow in as fog off the bay, but the stairs still reach sand. In season the weekend sites book up months out on ReserveCalifornia.
Longer trips from the Bay
The coast road south turns into the Big Sur run, the campgrounds strung down Highway 1; that one has its own base at campervan rentals in Monterey. Yosemite Valley is the other big haul east, and the Yosemite campervan lander covers the campgrounds and the Tioga Road timing. For pickups elsewhere in the state, the California hub lists them.