Summer evenings on the Marblehead peninsula wind down to a ferry wake fanning out toward the islands and a freighter sitting low and grey on the Lake Erie horizon. Port Clinton and the peninsula are flat lakeshore under a lot of open sky, and a family week here runs from a single spot. The motorhome stays set up on a campground field near the water all week, and each morning the only real decision is which boat to catch.
Kelleys Island and Put-in-Bay are the days out, the island shoreline coming up ahead of the bow while the mainland shrinks behind it. You ride back in the late afternoon and the rig is right where you left it, awning out and dinner a few steps away. If it's just the two of you and you'd rather sleep out on the islands, that trip in a smaller rig has its own page.
Between ferry days the week stays on the mainland. A blustery morning with whitecaps on the lake is a good one to stay at the site, walk the shore and let the kids run the open field. East Harbor State Park, out on the peninsula, shows up on travel-guide lists of Ohio RV parks, and Maumee Bay State Park is the other state campground on this shore, farther west toward Toledo. Look at each park's own page for site lengths and hookups before you choose a rig for either.
Erie Landing in Port Clinton is the sure thing for hookups on the lakefront, with every RV site full hookup at 50/30/20 amp as of October 2026. Reservations go through Campspot, so hold the site first and rent the motorhome to fit it.
Hocking Hills, from a resort pad near Logan
In Hocking Hills the trails drop off the ridges into hemlock gorges where the air turns cool and still, and the sandstone recess caves curve overhead like the inside of a shell. The week works as base and drive, a different gorge each day and the same pad every night. Hocking Hills State Park keeps a campground of its own, and a cluster of private RV resorts around Logan competes for the pull-through crowd. The hike-every-morning version of this trip lives on the Columbus page.
Hilltop Resorts lists paved pads from 35 to 70 feet, with full-hookup pull-throughs and back-ins at 50/30/20 amp, water and sewer, and online booking, as of October 2026. Book the pad before the rig here too, since its length and whether it pulls through decide which motorhome or towable makes sense. Some towable owners in the listings will deliver and set up on a resort pad, but that's arranged listing by listing, and the site reservation stays yours to hold.
Atwood, Tappan and Salt Fork in the Muskingum lake country
The conservancy lakes of east Ohio are still water and wooded shoreline at dusk, with sailboats crossing Atwood on a warm weekend and campfire smoke drifting over the campground edge. Plenty of Ohio families come back to the same lakeside site here summer after summer, and a week parked on the water is the long version of that habit. There's no ferry timetable to plan around, just the lake and a long evening outside.
The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District runs the campgrounds at both Atwood and Tappan, each with more than 500 sites ranging from waterfront and full-hookup down to basic and primitive, as of October 2026. Reservations are online through the conservancy. Salt Fork State Park, farther south in the same hills, is the one the guides point larger families toward for room to spread out, and its own page carries the site details. The same lakes as a quicker getaway are written up on Canton's page.
Deer Creek, Buckeye Lake and the weeks near Ohio's cities
Each of Ohio's bigger cities has a close-in RV week of its own, written up with its own pads. From Columbus it's Deer Creek State Park and the Ohio State Fair, and from Cincinnati it's Winton Woods, close enough to town for a Reds game and the zoo. Cowan Lake, a sailing lake south of Dayton, anchors the Dayton week.
Cleveland's week heads to the inland lakes southeast of the city, and the parked lake week at Buckeye Lake runs out of Thornville. Any of them pairs with Lake Erie or Hocking Hills when a family stretches one week into two.