Why there are no RV parks on Oak Island itself
People ask this at the front desk most weeks, usually in a slightly disappointed tone, and the answer is simply land. Oak Island is a barrier island about twelve miles long and in places only a few streets wide. Every acre of it is either a dune system, a house, a short-term rental or something the Town has put a parking lot on. The land values that follow from that do not support a campground, and the flood maps do not encourage anyone to try.
What the island has done instead is remarkable in its own way. Sixty-five public beach accesses is more than any other coastal town in North Carolina, and that is the Town’s own claim, not ours. A good number of them have parking, restrooms, a water fountain and an outdoor shower. If you cannot camp on the island, you can at least get onto it easily, which is more than can be said for a lot of the coast.
What “near Oak Island” actually means
Draw a twenty-minute circle around the Middleton Avenue bridge and you have the real answer. Inside it are a handful of campgrounds of very different kinds: a couple of small mainland parks, one or two that are mostly long-term, and us. Drive times are short down here because the roads are flat and empty, NC-211 will move you fifteen miles in the time a city would give you four.
From our gate at 1600 George II Highway SE it is roughly twenty-five minutes to the bridge and the first accesses. Southport is twenty minutes the other way. Downtown Wilmington is thirty. Myrtle Beach is about an hour if somebody insists. That spread is the actual argument for staying inland: you are not committed to one beach, you are within reach of three different kinds of day out.
Five questions worth asking before you book anywhere
Is it full hookup, and at what amperage?
Water and sewer at the pad changes a beach week completely, because a beach week generates an extraordinary amount of grey water. Ask about amps too. In a Carolina August, 30-amp service and two air conditioners is a conversation you will have with a breaker. All thirty of our sites are full hookup with 50-amp power.
What is the maximum stay?
Short-term parks and long-term parks look identical in photographs and feel nothing alike on a Tuesday evening. A park that is mostly monthly tenants is somebody’s neighbourhood, and you are a tourist in it. We are deliberately short-term — up to 60 days online, longer by arrangement with the office — which is why the place turns over and why the people you meet at the pool on a Friday arrived the same week you did.
Can you actually get the rig in?
Ask about road width, turning radius and pad length rather than just “do you take big rigs”, because every park says yes to that. Our roads and turns were laid out recently and for modern rigs, and every site has two parking spots so the car does not end up on the grass. If you are at the long end, call the office before you book and we will give you site numbers rather than a shrug.
Is there anything to do if the weather turns?
This is the question people forget and regret. A beach-only trip has one plan. Three days of onshore wind and rain in October will test a family of four in a travel trailer with nothing to do. Blackbeard’s Lost Treasure Hunt runs the length of the trails whatever the weather, and the aquarium at Fort Fisher is a ferry ride or a forty-minute drive away. Gem and fossil mining runs every day from nine to five, though the sluice is in the open air, so save that one for a dry afternoon.
What does the beach parking cost?
Nobody mentions this in the brochure and it adds up. Oak Island charges for beach parking from 1 April to 30 September, enforced daily from 9 AM to 5 PM: five dollars an hour, twenty dollars a day, eighty for the week. A family doing five beach days in July is spending a hundred dollars on tarmac. Outside those dates it is free, which is one of several reasons the people who have been coming here for years quietly book October.
How a week here usually goes
You arrive, you level, you hook up, and then you do not move the rig again for a week. That is the whole point of a mainland base. The car goes to the beach in the morning and comes back sandy; somebody walks to the bathhouse to shower, which is the single thing guests write about most in our reviews; and the children disappear into the gaga pit and come back out of the woods with a treasure map and a bag of gemstones.
Most weeks end up with one Oak Island day, one Southport day, one Wilmington day, one day at the sluice and the pool, and two days of deliberately nothing. The two days of nothing are the ones people talk about afterwards.
Getting here with something long behind you
Come in on US-17 and down NC-211 rather than threading the smaller roads, and you will meet nothing you need to worry about. The turn onto George II Highway is straightforward and the entrance is wide. The directions page has the approach written out properly, including the one turn we would rather you did not take with forty feet behind you.
Twenty-Five Minutes From Oak Island, Under Forty Acres of Pine
Full-hookup RV sites with 50-amp power, cabins, and a fire pit at every one. Checking your dates takes about a minute.