Thursday evening before a Penn State home game, the gate opens at Grange Park in Centre Hall and motorhomes start filling the fairground grass in the order they pull in, row behind row. By Friday night the rows have turned into a neighborhood of grills, flags and folding chairs, everyone in blue and white. Saturday morning the whole place drains into a line for the shuttle to Beaver Stadium, and after the game it settles back in for one more night before the Sunday roll-out.
A rig of any size can make that weekend, because Grange Park sets no size limit for RVs and runs electric and water to the rows, weather permitting. The tanks are the thing to plan around. The dump station opens only on Sunday morning, so arrive with empty tanks and dump on the way out. Late in the summer the same grounds fill again for the Grange Fair, when tents and RVs pitch together in a week-long encampment across the fairgrounds.
Closer to the stadium, Penn State runs its own Overnight RV lots on Orchard Road, on the shuttle route. A rig there needs an RV pass and a designated space, and the lots open Thursday evening and clear out by Sunday noon.
Home weekends pull everything in town onto the same dates. The rigs in the listings, the Grange Park rows and the Orchard Road spaces all go to the same crowd, so lock the lot and the rig together as soon as you know which game you're after. Plenty of game-weekend listings are motorhomes or trailers an owner delivers to the lot and sets up before you arrive, but that's listing by listing, and the lot's rules still apply to whoever is parked in the space.
Raymond B. Winter State Park in Bald Eagle State Forest
Away from football, a small lake fills the floor of a shallow basin at Raymond B. Winter State Park, with rocky ridges on every side and oak and pine down to the shore. The rig stays level on its site all week. Mornings go to the walk around the lake, afternoons to the observation window at the bird-watching station, and in summer the air runs off the site's electric while the kids are out.
The campground has 61 sites for tents, trailers and motor homes, most with electric hookups, plus a sanitary dump station, open mid-April to mid-December with reservations through the state parks system. Book the site before the rig, since the site you land decides how big a rental makes sense, and the campground roads are reported to wind tight through the trees. Two people on a lighter trip have more room to roam, and the State College campervan page covers Black Moshannon, Rothrock State Forest and Bald Eagle State Park (a separate place from this state forest), plus a game-weekend night at Beaver Stadium in something smaller.
When the lake loop is full, Poe Valley State Park, deeper in the same forest, has 45 sites, 27 of them on 50-amp electric, and its own dump station, open mid-April to early December. Either park is a summer week built around the electric, and both close their campgrounds before winter.
Bellefonte KOA, a hookup base for Happy Valley
Evenings at the Bellefonte / State College KOA end at the fire ring on a deluxe site's patio, and the days go to campus, downtown State College and the rest of Happy Valley. For a family that wants full hookups all week and short drives every morning, it's the easy base. The pull-throughs carry full hookups on 50/30 amp, the XL pull-throughs are long enough to skip unhooking, and the deluxe back-in sites come with the patio, all reserved through KOA.
On home weekends the KOA competes with the tailgate lots for the same crowd, so reserve it alongside the rig. It also makes a soft landing for a late Thursday arrival, once the Grange Park gate has closed for the night. The rest of the state's RV trips, from Hershey to Knoebels and the Pocono Raceway weekends, are on the Pennsylvania RV rentals page.