Summer on Rhode Island's south shore comes down to Charlestown for anyone traveling with a rig. Motorhomes and trailers settle in under the oaks at Burlingame, back from the sand on Watchaug Pond, and a second row lines up along the Charlestown Breachway, where the channel runs out into Block Island Sound and people cast for striped bass off the rocks. The days go to the Charlestown beaches and the pond, and the nights go back to whichever of the two you booked.
This is a dry-camped week, with the rig running on its own tanks, batteries and generator, and the order of the nights doing real work. Narragansett and the Point Judith ferry sit just east along the same coast, which is how Block Island gets folded in as the day off.
Burlingame State Campground and the Charlestown Breachway
Burlingame spreads its rustic sites through the oaks around Watchaug Pond. The state park's day-use side has a picnic area and sand beach on the pond, plus the nearly 8-mile Gormley trail through Kimball Wildlife Refuge for a morning off the beach.
The campground has about 700 sites and 20 cabins, with no utilities at the sites and a dump and water-fill station on the grounds. Main Camp is tent-only, so rigs book elsewhere in the campground. As of October 2026, the state is building three new bathhouses at Burlingame, with fewer sites available, the Main Camp pond swimming area closed, and completion anticipated in April 2027.
The Charlestown Breachway feels nothing like the woods. Rigs park in a row with the sound out front and the breachway current sliding past, and the fishing happens on the rocks at the channel mouth. The state takes 75 self-contained units there, and the season opens in spring.
Self-contained at the Breachway means manufacturer-installed holding tanks, with no canvas tops and no open fires, and each stay comes with one free dump at Burlingame or Fishermen's Memorial, per the Breachway rules. That suggests the order for the week: the Breachway first while the tanks are fresh, then Burlingame for the back half, where you can dump and refill without leaving the campground.
Book the sites before you book the rig. Each Rhode Island state site carries its own maximum length on Reserve America, so the site you land decides whether the week works in a shorter Class C or a longer motorhome. If the site comes back short, or it's just two of you, the Rhode Island campervan page runs the same beaches and a Block Island crossing in something smaller.
Block Island by ferry, with the rig parked in Narragansett
From the Point Judith dock the ferry pushes its bow wave out across Block Island Sound until the island's bluffs come up off the water ahead. The Block Island Ferry runs from Point Judith year-round, so the crossing fits the shoulder months as well as July. The island day is the same whatever you drove down in, and the RV question is what to do with the rig.
Leave it at Fishermen's Memorial State Campground in Narragansett, about a mile from the ferry dock, and walk on. Fishermen's is the hookup week the Providence RV page writes up, and it makes an easy night on either side of the crossing. Newport, the ferry's other port, is a day of its own, with the Cliff Walk and Aquidneck Island on the Providence campervan page.
