St. Louis is a staging city rather than a destination for a van. Very little inside the metro is worth the fuel; the trip starts once you are out on one of the four interstates that meet here, and those four are what make the city a better starting point than its scenery suggests.
The Ozarks are the actual reason to rent here
Head south and the terrain changes faster than the map suggests. In the St. Francois Mountains, Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park near Middle Brook has the water-carved rock chutes the area is named for, and Elephant Rocks State Park at Belleview is a day-use walk among granite boulders roughly 1.5 billion years old, with an accessible Braille Trail looping the main formation.
Further south is Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the first national park area created to protect a wild river system, covering the Current and the Jacks Fork. The Park Service routes visitors there on I-44 out of St. Louis, then State Route 68 south from St. James and State Route 19 south into the park. The second half of that drive is two-lane Ozark road rather than interstate, so it takes longer than the mileage implies. Eminence sits in the middle of the park; Big Spring is over at Van Buren.
Its campgrounds (Akers, Alley Spring, Big Spring, Pulltite, Round Spring and Two Rivers) book through recreation.gov, and this is where the van-specific detail matters. Alley Spring has 50-amp electric and water at selected sites, with no sewer. Big Spring's electric sites are confined to the 200 loop. Assume everything else is dry.
Closer in, Meramec State Park sits just east of Sullivan, where I-44 meets Missouri Route 185, and it has the widest spread of site types near the city: basic, electric, electric and water, and sewer/electric/water, plus tours of Fisher Cave. Babler State Park in Wildwood is the close-in option, minutes from the western edge of the metro. If you would rather start nearer the Ozarks than the Arch, it is worth looking at campervan rentals across Missouri rather than the metro alone.
Water goes off before the good weather does
October is the best month here and also the month the taps close. The Ozark riverways campgrounds run year-round, but showers and flush toilets open only from April 15 to October 15, and the water systems shut off from October 15 to April 14. Missouri state parks do the same on their own dates: Meramec's showers and water run April 1 to October 31, and in winter potable water comes from one frost-free spigot at the dump station.
Read that against a St. Louis summer and the planning falls out on its own. Humid July and August nights are what make an electric site worth paying attention to rather than a nicety, and by late October the weather has turned good but you are carrying your own water.
Spring is flood season, and it is not theoretical. The Meramec runs 218 free-flowing miles into the Mississippi just south of the city at Arnold and Oakville. Eureka and Pacific took two "100-year" floods within sixteen months, in December 2015 and May 2017, and the 2015 event shut down I-55.
Float trips, and the rules nobody reads
Summer weekends on the Current and the Jacks Fork are a regional institution, and campgrounds near the put-ins fill accordingly. Two sets of rules apply depending on whose land you are on, and both are enforced:
- On the national riverways: one PFD aboard per person in vessels under 16 feet, children under seven wearing one at all times, no glass or styrofoam in any capsizable vessel or within 50 feet of the river, and no lashing tubes or vessels together.
- On Mark Twain National Forest land: no glass beverage or food container in a canoe, kayak, raft or tube, or within 50 feet of a navigable waterway, and every vessel must carry a closable trash container fixed to it.
Mark Twain National Forest, run out of Rolla on the same I-44 corridor, is also the dispersed-camping option. The forest-wide order allows 14 days of camping in any 30-day period, after which you may not camp anywhere in the forest until that period ends. Our roundup of national forest campgrounds open year-round names the developed sites in Mark Twain that stay open through the winter.
Route 66 west, and the long hauls
I-44 begins in St. Louis at I-70, and virtually all of it east of Springfield was once US 66, which makes the westbound trip the one themed route out of the city that runs on genuine preserved alignment rather than signage alone. Route 66 State Park sits at exits 265 and 266 near Eureka; its visitor center occupies the Bridgehead Inn, a 1935 roadhouse that stood on the original road, and the park itself is the reclaimed site of Times Beach. Do not plan to take a van over the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge: it carried the Route 66 bypass across the Mississippi, but it has been closed to vehicles since 1970 and now serves walkers and cyclists only. The vehicle crossing at that point is I-270.
For distance, the interstate junction earns its keep. I-55 leaves in both directions, running 294 miles of Illinois to Chicago on a stretch built as the alternate to US 66, and 210 miles down Missouri toward Memphis. If you want that first run without the return leg, compare campervan rentals in Chicago at the other end of it. I-64 starts at Wentzville just west of the city and runs 964 miles east through Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia to the Virginia coast, which is one road the entire way. I-70 west is the Colorado run, and the numbers show why it is a two-week trip rather than a long weekend: 249 miles to cross Missouri to Kansas City, then 424 more across Kansas before you reach the Colorado line.
Pickup
St. Louis Lambert International (STL) has two terminals and on-site rental car facilities. Campervan handovers, though, are not standardized the way an airport car counter is, so settle before you fly whether the van is collected at the airport or at an address in the metro, and how you are getting there. That one detail is what costs people an afternoon.