Amish buggies and bicycles share the shoulder on the county roads east of South Bend, between Elkhart and Shipshewana, with farms on both sides and traffic moving at buggy speed. In Shipshewana, Tuesday and Wednesday mornings belong to the flea market, aisle after aisle of vendors under canopies. Over in Elkhart, the town that calls itself the RV Capital of the World, the RV/MH Hall of Fame fills a hall with motorhomes and trailers going back a century.
That museum is the natural first morning of an RV week here. It's the only museum of its kind, by the Elkhart County visitor bureau's account, and it stays open year-round, so it still works after the flea market has packed up for the season.
Elkhart Campground takes the first couple of nights, while the museum and Elkhart itself fill the days. Its pull-throughs are mostly 70 to 80 feet long, as the campground lists them, so a family motorhome pulls straight through with room to spare, and the dump station and propane fill on site take care of the morning you move on.
From there the rig moves to Shipshewana RV Park for the flea market days, a park of mostly angled pull-throughs run by the Shipshewana Trading Place that also holds the market. The park doesn't list a length limit on its site, so lock in the site and confirm your rig's length with the park before you book the motorhome.
Once the rig is plugged in at Shipshewana, the back roads make a bike day, out along the Pumpkinvine trail and onto the county roads, with the motorhome waiting at the site. A couple of days of flea market aisles and slow farm roads is the whole point, and nobody has to drive anywhere to get it.
Notre Dame home weekends with the motorhome in an RV lot
Home weekends in South Bend start in the tailgate lots, which fill through the morning with motorhomes, canopies and fans in navy and gold heading toward Notre Dame Stadium. A motorhome makes an easy tailgate base, with a fridge, a bathroom and the awning's shade a few steps from the grill.
The campus rules treat anything longer than 20 feet or wider than 7.5 feet as oversized, so a motorhome pays to park in an RV or bus lot, and the Saint Mary's College, Holy Cross College and Party Zone lots take RVs, per the university's gameday parking page, as of October 2026. No lot allows overnight parking, and vehicles still there are towed starting at 6 a.m. under the tailgating rules, so the rig sleeps at a full-hookup park off campus and comes in on game morning.
Home weekends pull motorhomes in from every direction, and a game date competes for the same rigs on the listings and the same hookup sites east of town, so book the park before the motorhome. Early in the season, a home game and the last flea market days of the year in Shipshewana can share one week, Saturday at the stadium and Tuesday in the aisles.
Two people on a game weekend can go smaller, and the South Bend campervan page covers that version of the weekend along with the Indiana Dunes and Potato Creek State Park. The Dunes are worth the drive for the sand climb above Lake Michigan alone. The rest of the state's rig trips, from Holiday World to race month in Indianapolis, are on the Indiana RV page.