McMinnville, OR RV Rentals

In harvest season the Willamette Valley wakes up under fog, and by late morning it has burned off the valley floor to show vine rows climbing the Dundee Hills and the Eola-Amity slopes. The days go to tasting rooms with gravel lots and the country roads between them, and every evening ends back in McMinnville at the same spot the rig has held since the first night. For a family that's the appeal of the week: the grown-ups taste, the kids get a wooden flying boat and an indoor water park, and nobody breaks camp to do any of it.

Home base is Olde Stone RV Resort on Three Mile Lane, level concrete pads set in landscaped open ground with a big western sky over them. The pull-through and back-in sites have full hookups with 20, 30 and 50 amp service, and the resort takes big rigs. For the tasting itself, the resort keeps a list of wine tour companies that do the driving, so the motorhome stays parked and whoever would have driven gets a glass too. After a day of tasting, the heated outdoor pool, open Memorial Day through Labor Day, is where the kids spend the late afternoon.

Book the pad before the rig, since the resort recommends reservations from April through October. If Olde Stone is full for your dates, Willamette Wine Country RV Park in Dayton is the other full-hookup park on Travel Oregon's Willamette Valley RV route.

Champoeg State Heritage Area near Newberg is the second base, and the natural first night for anyone coming down from Portland or Sherwood. Plenty of trips out of Portland use it for a single night and move on. On a wine week it earns a few nights of its own, so half the tasting starts from the Newberg side, with full-hookup sites, electric sites with water, and a dump station for the rig.

If it's only two of you hopping between tasting rooms, a smaller rig is easier in those gravel lots, and campervans across Oregon suit that trip. Tasting days that drift south toward Salem pick up on Salem's RV page.

The Spruce Goose, a walk from the pad

The Spruce Goose fills its hangar at the North American Aerospace Museum, the museum McMinnville knew for years as Evergreen, and you walk in under the wing of a wooden flying boat that keeps going overhead long after you expect it to end. A giant-screen theater and an indoor water park share the grounds.

Olde Stone is next door, so this is the day the rig doesn't move: walk over in the morning, give the kids the afternoon in the water park, and walk back for dinner. It's also the plan for a winter week, when fog and rain settle into the valley.

Lincoln City and Devils Lake on OR-18

The coast day follows OR-18 west out of the valley to Lincoln City and its seven miles of white sand, the same road the wine-to-coast itineraries use. Right inside town is Devils Lake, a peat-bog lake with a state campground on its shore, and it turns a long beach day into a night by the water before the drive back to the vines.

Devils Lake State Recreation Area has full-hookup sites with cable TV, so the rig plugs in the same as it does at Olde Stone. The Three Capes coast farther north on OR-6 starts from Hillsboro, and the rest of the state's RV trips are on the Oregon RV page.