The night on a Tallahassee van trip is Ochlockonee River State Park, south of Sopchoppy where the Ochlockonee meets the Dead River. Thirty sites sit back under longleaf pine, every one with 50-amp power and water at the pad, and it is the only public campground the trip has. Get the pad before you get the van, because Wakulla Springs keeps no campground of its own and 30 sites is the whole supply. The van is the second booking.
The spring at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park is worth arranging a whole day around, and the day splits in two. The swimming area sits right over the vent, 69-degree freshwater with a 22-foot dive and observation tower standing off the edge of it, and swimming stays inside that marked area. Snorkeling in there is fine. Scuba is not.
The other half is the tour boat, a two-mile loop down the Wakulla River and back under bald cypress, past wading birds and alligators stretched out on the bank. Manatees come up the river often enough that everybody asks, and often enough is as far as anyone will commit.
The park runs 8 a.m. until sundown, 365 days a year, and admission is $6 for a vehicle carrying two to eight people, $4 if you are alone in it, and $2 on foot or on a bike, per Florida State Parks (as of August 2026).
If you want to walk it off, the Cherokee Sink Trail is 1.4 miles out to a sinkhole lake 80 feet deep, entered from Highway 61 rather than the main gate, and the park's nature trail system runs up to nine miles (as of August 2026). What Wakulla does not have is anywhere to sleep, so the evening drive runs south.
Ochlockonee River State Park, south of Sopchoppy
The swimming area and the picnic ground are down at the confluence, there is a ramp for whatever you put in the water, and the sites are open and sandy, in the kind of old pine that red-cockaded woodpeckers still nest in.
Three of the 30 sites are accessible, and each pad comes with a fire ring, picnic table, and clothesline. No sewer at the site, so you empty at the dump station on your way out, and the comfort station has hot showers and an outside dish sink. Florida State Parks puts the campground limit at 40 feet of RV (as of August 2026).
Forty feet is far more room than a van takes, so if you are bringing more people than a van sleeps, RVs out of Tallahassee book into the same sites.
Reservations go through Florida State Parks or 800-326-3521, and the reservation fee is nonrefundable (as of August 2026), so settle the dates before you pay it. Van dates move. The pad does not.
St. Marks lighthouse and the refuge road
South of town the pine flatwoods give out into salt marsh, and Lighthouse Road runs through St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge to a brick tower finished in 1842 with the Gulf behind it. The drive in is most of the reason to go. Freshwater impoundments and levees sit on both sides of the road, herons and egrets working the shallows all year, ducks in the pools through winter.
The visitor center is about 25 miles south of Tallahassee, out SR 363 to Wakulla, east on SR 267, then east on US 98 across the St. Marks River and right onto Lighthouse Road. The gate opens at 6 a.m. and entry is $5 a vehicle (as of August 2026). Levees and administrative roads close now and then for prescribed burns and wildlife work, so the loop you had in mind may not be open the morning you turn up.
Coe Landing and Camel Lake, when Ochlockonee is full
Thirty sites go quickly on a holiday weekend, and the dates that fill the campground are the dates that clear out the local vans. A warm spring Saturday is a Wakulla swim, an Ochlockonee night, and a van booking all at once, and the same calendar carries all three. Book against that or go midweek.
There are two fallbacks west. Coe Landing is the close one, a Leon County park on Lake Talquin at 1208 Coe Landing Road, with a campground, an electrical connection, restrooms, a dump station, and a boat ramp. The county lists the campground and the ramp as open 24 hours (as of August 2026).
Camel Lake is the deeper one, ten sites in the Apalachicola National Forest, some of them electric, with a bathhouse and flush toilets and reservations on recreation.gov (as of August 2026). Getting there is SR-20 west through Hosford to Bristol, then south on SR-12 and two miles of unpaved Forest Road 105, which is worth knowing before you point a rental van down it.
East of Tallahassee
Keep going east and the country turns to river bottom. Live Oak is the base for the Suwannee, and Gainesville picks up the prairie below that. The rest of the state, panhandle beaches down to the Keys, is on the Florida hub.