Lake Shawnee's campground parks the rig on a concrete pad with a charcoal grill at the door and the lake close behind. It's Shawnee County's lake, right inside Topeka, and the swim cove is open from sunrise to sunset to anyone registered at the campground. Nobody has to break camp to reach any of it, so the RV gets set up on the first afternoon and stays put until checkout.
Mornings belong to the paved 7-mile trail that rings the water. It's an easy loop on bikes and a long one on small legs, so the bikes on the back of the rig earn their spot. Groceries, a pharmacy run or a rainy-afternoon movie are all in town, which is what makes a full week here easy with kids.
A week without moving the rig is easiest with sewer at the site, and the county's hookup sections have it. Sections B, D and E carry full hookups with water and sewer from April into mid-October, B and D sit on concrete, and section B lists both 50-amp and 30-amp power. B and E each have a short row of pull-throughs, D is all back-in, and the dump station on site handles the last morning.
Lake Shawnee is the in-town campground Topeka knows, with 114 sites in total, so the pad is the first booking and the RV is the second. Pick the section and the dates, reserve them, and then match the rig to the spot you got.
After mid-October the campground pulls back to sites 35 to 56 in section A, gravel back-ins that keep 50-amp power year-round. Water at those sites is on-season only, and the north bath house, playground and swim beach stay closed until spring. A late-fall or early-spring stay still works for a rig that arrives with a full fresh tank.
Perry Lake and the Slough Creek loops
Slough Creek's loops wind under oaks on the Delaware River arm of Perry Lake, a shaded, wooded week after the open shoreline at Lake Shawnee. It's the largest of the Corps campgrounds at Perry, and Rock Creek and the Longview group camp round out the Corps loops on the lake. Longview suits a reunion or a few families traveling together, with its electric 30-amp sites in one group camp.
The Corps' Perry Lake page counts 173 sites at Slough Creek, mostly electric and water, plus electric-only and primitive loops, and just three with sewer. Rock Creek has electric-and-water and primitive sites. With two dump stations at Slough Creek and two more at Rock Creek, a rig on a water-and-electric site can dump on the way out, or midweek if the family runs the showers hard. Two people happy on an electric-only site can go smaller with a campervan rental in Kansas.
Reservations go through Recreation.gov, so the same rule holds here: lock the site, then the RV. Slough Creek's fee season runs mid-April to mid-October, and Rock Creek and Longview run May through September.
Farther west toward Manhattan, Milford and Tuttle Creek have their own Corps and state park loops, which the Kansas RV page covers lake by lake.