Up on the ridges of Brown County State Park, the overnight is a rig leveled under the trees on a wooded loop above Nashville, with the hills rolling off in every direction and a fire going by dark. A motorhome does best here as a base for the whole week. You set up once, then drive out along the ridge roads, down into Nashville for dinner, and back up to the same site every night.
Fall color is what fills the loops, and the color weekends are the busiest stretch of the year on the ridges. The park's north road comes in through a covered bridge, the prettiest approach in a car and the wrong one for a family motorhome, because the bridge is too low and too light for a rig.
Brown County State Park through the west gate on State Road 46
Every RV and every vehicle towing a trailer has to use the west entrance on State Road 46, about two miles west of Nashville, since the north bridge clears 9 feet and carries 3 tons. Phone maps don't always know that and will send a motorhome to the bridge anyway, so put the west gate in as the destination before you get close.
Past the gate, the electric loops, Buffalo Ridge and Raccoon Ridge among them, run 20 to 50 amp in a mix of back-in and pull-through sites, per the Indiana State Parks reservation portal as of October 2026. The park also keeps a camp store and a dumping station, so a week on the ridge never needs a trip out of the park to empty the tanks.
Reserve the site before you rent the rig. The portal opens sites six months ahead, and a family planning around the leaves is booking in spring. Site lengths change from one site to the next, so the length listed on the site you land decides whether you rent a long Class A or a mid-size motorhome.
If it's just two of you and the site you got is one of the short ones, a campervan fits it with room to spare. For the lighter version of the same park, paired with Monroe Lake, see Bloomington's campervan trip.
Holiday World, Patoka Lake and the family weeks south
Down in Santa Claus, the summer week is Holiday World and Splashin' Safari by day and Lake Rudolph Campground and RV Resort by night, a resort park a shuttle ride from the roller coasters with a fishing lake behind the sites. The rig stays parked all week while the kids work through the rides, and the season runs spring to late October, with holiday weekends after that. The Evansville RV trip covers the campground and the week in full.
Patoka Lake is the slower week, a long reservoir where wooded draws run down to the water and ospreys and nesting eagles work the lake. Its Newton-Stewart campground has 455 electric sites and a dumping station, and in summer heat the air conditioning is what makes a lake week with kids work. Reserve through the state portal before you rent, the same as Brown County, and the Patoka Lake RV trip has the loops and the days out.
Starve Hollow State Recreation Area and Versailles State Park fill out the south for a rig, and the Greenwood RV trip runs both.
The 500, Elkhart and the weeks up north
May in Indianapolis belongs to the 500, and the Speedway runs its own RV and pull-behind camping for race week. Race week and the Brickyard in July pull every rig and every pad within reach of the city onto the same dates, so a family planning an ordinary May weekend near Indianapolis is competing with race fans for the same motorhomes and the same sites. Lock the lot or the campground first, then the rig, and the Indianapolis RV trip has the lots, the passes and the generator rules.
Up near the Michigan line, Elkhart is the RV industry's home town, with acres of finished rigs on the lots and the RV/MH Hall of Fame and Museum full of house cars and early trailers. Pair it with Shipshewana's flea market days and the Amish back roads between the two towns, and let the South Bend RV trip handle where the rig sleeps.
Farther west on Lake Michigan, the Indiana Dunes climb from the woods to a dune ridge over the water, and that trip, along with Turkey Run, is written for a smaller rig on the Indiana campervan page.