Pine woods and salt marsh slide past on I-95 north of Orlando, and the first exit worth taking leads to the coquina walls of St. Augustine. From there the road runs up through Georgia and South Carolina toward the Virginia shore, broken each evening by a stop worth the miles. The interstate is the easy part, so plan the week around the nights. The best of them comes on Jekyll Island, Georgia.
St. Augustine is close enough to reach after a late start. Walk the Castillo de San Marcos and the old town while the light goes, then sleep at Anastasia State Park on the beach side of the water.
Jekyll is the night to book before anything else, rig included. Live oaks close over the campground and keep the rig in shade through the afternoon. The island's campground strongly recommends reservations and keeps 216 of its 228 sites on full hookups with 30 and 50 amp service, so it is also where you empty the tanks and fill the water before the next stretch. Ask what hookups your sites at Anastasia and Hunting Island carry when you reserve them, and plan the dumps around Jekyll.
From Jekyll the road crosses into South Carolina for a night at Hunting Island State Park, and the last coastal stop is a choice between the Outer Banks and First Landing at Virginia Beach. Late-summer and fall storms can close the coastal campgrounds along this road, which is why the run north is a spring trip.
At the top of the run, Cruise America runs one-way rentals that pick up at one location and drop at another, and its hub at Warrenton, Virginia, is the far end of this road. El Monte RV lays out the same east coast drive from Florida toward New York City.
Theme park week from a Kissimmee resort pad
Orlando's other rig trip stays in town, with families settling a motorhome onto a resort pad in Kissimmee or Lake Buena Vista for the week. Palms shade the site, the pool deck is down the row, a shuttle runs to the gates, and the rig becomes the kitchen and the afternoon nap between park days. Orlando/Kissimmee KOA and Tropical Palms are the resorts families name most, and a full-hookup pad is the one to want, because in summer the air conditioning is the point of the rig.
The rig stays put all week, since the theme-park lots don't allow overnight stays, so park days start on the shuttle or in a car. January to March is the crowded stretch, when snowbirds and school-break families chase the same resort pads and the same rigs, so lock the resort site first and book the rig to its dates.
For two people in something smaller, Wekiwa Springs in Apopka and the campground at Disney's Fort Wilderness have their own Orlando page. Launch week on the Space Coast, a rocket climbing off the Cape over the Indian River, is Melbourne's RV trip.
Blue Spring State Park in manatee season
From mid-November through March, manatees crowd into the spring run at Blue Spring State Park in Orange City, stacked in water clear enough to count them from the boardwalk rail. It's the winter outing Central Florida families come back to, and a night at the park's campground turns a crowded afternoon into a slow weekend.
Weekend sites fill through manatee season, so reserve the campsite before the rig, and check the park's posted length limit when you book, because that number decides how big a motorhome comes along. Blue Spring also makes an easy first night for the run north, a short way up from Orlando before the road turns for the coast.
