Last Updated: May 2026
After the thunder of Niagara Falls, we pointed west and began the long drive toward Indiana — and toward a date with the factory that built our motorhome. The route took us through Erie, Pennsylvania on the southern shore of Lake Erie, then across Ohio in time for an unexpected Halloween celebration in a packed RV park, and finally into the heart of Amish and Mennonite country in northern Indiana. Nappanee was our destination: the birthplace of our Newmar motorhome and the place where the warranty work we’d been scheduling since late summer would finally get done.
We had no particular expectations for any of these stops, which may be why they all surprised us. The peninsula at Presque Isle turned out to be one of the finest state parks on the Great Lakes. Port Clinton, Ohio handed us a fully costumed, 100-trick-or-treater Halloween party we hadn’t planned on. And Nappanee gave us Amish buggies, a round barn theatre, city art, and three weeks of 5am wake-up calls by train horn. You take the beautiful with the industrial.
Erie, Pennsylvania
We stopped for two nights at the Erie KOA on the south shore of Lake Erie, and the campground delivered a solid setup: 50-amp service, 45 psi water pressure, sewer, and satellite access — though the internet was, as promised on the KOA website, optimistically described as “available.” A group of Canadians arrived mid-stay to celebrate their Thanksgiving, and the park took on a festive energy. We ventured into downtown Erie for dinner at a wine bar and came away impressed by how much the city had going on.
Erie has a genuinely interesting history that most people driving through don’t know. It was a major maritime center after the American Revolution — Commodore Perry built his fleet here during the War of 1812. The city later became a railroad hub during the westward expansion era, then an iron and steel powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution. Today Erie is one of the leading manufacturing centers for plastics in the country; roughly 10% of all plastic products made in America originate here. Not the postcard history, but impressive in its own industrial way.
Presque Isle State Park
The name comes from the French: presque île, meaning “almost an island.” And that’s exactly what it is — a 3,112-acre sandy peninsula that juts into Lake Erie just minutes from downtown Erie. Presque Isle State Park is one of the most visited parks in Pennsylvania, and after spending a morning there, the reason is obvious: miles of beaches, picnic areas, boat launches, and a beautiful bicycle and pedestrian path that traces the length of the peninsula. The lake views are expansive, and in October the light has that particular gold quality that makes everything look like it belongs in a painting.
The Presque Isle Lighthouse, built in 1872, sits near the neck of the peninsula and is one of the park’s most photographed landmarks. We also had an unexpected wildlife encounter on one of the roads through the park — a snapping turtle had decided that the pavement was a reasonable place to spend the afternoon, and was not particularly interested in our opinion on the matter. Large, prehistoric-looking, and utterly unimpressed by oncoming traffic. Presque Isle’s kind of mascot.
Port Clinton, Ohio — Halloween at Cedarlane RV
Port Clinton calls itself “Vacationland” and is a major summertime destination on Lake Erie’s Ohio shore. We arrived in late October to find Cedarlane RV Park — a sprawling 280-site park — completely full. We also arrived on the eve of their Halloween celebration, a detail not mentioned at check-in until we were already settled in. A quick run to Walmart for candy, and we were ready. More than a hundred trick-or-treaters came through in costume over the course of the evening, the park organized games and contests, and a live band kept things lively until well after dark. It was one of those nights that happens entirely by accident and turns out to be a highlight of the whole trip.
Nappanee, Indiana — Our RV’s Birthplace
Four hours past miles of flat Indiana cornfields, we arrived in Nappanee. The city’s motto is “embrace the pace,” which felt less like a slogan and more like a warning. This is the heart of Amish and Mennonite country in northern Indiana, and the pace here is set not by smartphones or expressways but by horse-drawn buggies on two-lane roads. After two months of tourist destinations and highway miles, there was something genuinely grounding about that.
Online reviews had warned us that there “wasn’t much to do” in Nappanee. We took that as a challenge. What we found was a walkable downtown with genuine character, public art scattered throughout, and the kind of unhurried friendliness that’s harder to find the closer you get to a major city. The Amish and Mennonite presence gives the area a quality you don’t encounter many places — horse-drawn buggies sharing the road with pickup trucks, hand-lettered roadside stands, and a visible connection to a way of life that operates entirely outside the rhythms we’d been living in.
Round Barn Theatre at Amish Acres
We caught a performance of Sister Act at the Round Barn Theatre — and it was sold out. The play follows a woman placed in witness protection in a convent, with drama, humor, and musical numbers that had the audience on their feet. The production was genuinely polished; we were not expecting that level of craft in a touring theatre in small-town Indiana, and we were happily wrong. The theatre itself is the centerpiece of the story: a round barn built in 1911 in Bremen, Indiana, later moved and restored at its current home in Nappanee. It’s a remarkable structure, and the acoustics inside are something else entirely.
Amish Acres also has a collection of shops and a restaurant serving traditional Amish cooking — thresher’s dinners, bean soup, apple butter, the kind of food that makes you want to move a lot slower and eat a lot more. It’s a worthwhile stop even if you’re not there for the theatre.
The Newmar Factory
The reason we came to Nappanee was Newmar — the company that built our motorhome, headquartered here since 1968. They maintain a gravel parking lot adjacent to the factory with free 50-amp hookup sites, 45 psi water pressure, and sewer. Free wifi comes included, and while it was slow, it beat most RV parks we’d stayed in. The catch: the experience is industrial in the most literal sense.
Trains run past the site all day and all night. Sandy needed four nights before she stopped waking up to the horns. Starting around 4am, a steady stream of trucks and cars arrived at the work parking lot next door. By 5am, the adjacent warehouses were in full operation. A tractor moving new travel trailers across the lot each morning served as a reliable backup alarm around 5am. The Newmar service technician collects your RV at 6am sharp, works until 2pm, and is — we should say — significantly more efficient and thorough than any dealer service center we’d used before. The work gets done right; you just surrender a few weeks of sleep to make it happen.
We took the factory tour, and it’s worth doing if you own a Newmar or are curious about how these machines are built. Watching a motorhome take shape from a bare chassis through all the stages of fabrication, cabinetry, systems installation, and finishing is genuinely fascinating. Photography was not permitted inside the factory floor — a request we respected — but the mental images have stayed with us.
Walking Nappanee: City Art & inTech RV
Despite the early mornings, we enjoyed exploring Nappanee on foot. It’s an old city with a well-preserved historic core and a collection of public art installations that gave the streets real personality. The murals, sculptures, and installations scattered through downtown turned an ordinary walk into something worth photographing.
Right next door to the Newmar facility sits inTech RV, which turned out to be fascinating in its own right. inTech takes the design language of vintage retro trailers — the classic rounded silhouettes that defined the 1950s and 60s — but builds them in aircraft-grade aluminum rather than the original steel and wood. The result is a trailer that looks like a beautiful artifact but is genuinely lightweight, structurally solid, and outfitted with modern systems. It’s a smart answer to the question of how to honor the past without being enslaved to its limitations.
Elkhart, Indiana
About thirty minutes from Nappanee, Elkhart is worth a half-day. The city has a nicely developed riverwalk pathway along the St. Joseph River, lined with sculptures and public art in a way that makes the walk genuinely interesting rather than just pleasant exercise. Elkhart is also the RV manufacturing capital of the world — roughly 80% of all RVs sold in North America are built within a short drive of here — though the city’s public face is more cultural than industrial.
The standout piece on the riverwalk is a larger-than-life reproduction of Grant Wood’s American Gothic — the stern farmer and his companion rendered in three dimensions at monumental scale. Something about seeing that iconic flat image turned into a physical, walk-around object is both funny and strangely moving. We spent more time with it than we expected to.
Elkhart also participates in a tradition we’d been encountering across the country: the themed community sculpture. Cities pick a subject — cats, dogs, apples, buffalo, owls, hearts — and commission local artists to paint and embellish identical forms in their own individual style, then display them throughout downtown. By October 2017 we’d seen versions in dozens of cities, and Elkhart had chosen elk as their subject. The results ranged from sublime to wonderfully absurd.
Seward Johnson Sculptures
Elkhart was hosting a temporary exhibition of work by Seward Johnson that happened to coincide with our visit — and we were glad we didn’t miss it. Johnson is the artist known for his hyperrealistic cast bronze figures depicting people engaged in ordinary activities: reading a newspaper, checking a watch, eating lunch, hailing a cab. He has created more than 450 life-size figures displayed at locations around the country, and his entire project is a celebration of the mundane — an argument that everyday human moments are worth the same artistic attention as grand historical events. At full scale in a public space, the effect is genuinely uncanny. The figures blend into crowds, catch you off guard, and make you look twice at your assumptions about what’s real.
The exhibition was temporary — after a few weeks the figures were gone. We were lucky to catch them, and they’ve stuck with us in a way that a lot of more “important” art hasn’t.
October in Indiana is something worth stopping for. The leaves were turning, pumpkins appeared on every porch and every farm stand, and the corn — still standing in massive stretches across the countryside — was waiting for harvest. Indiana is one of the leading popcorn-producing states in the country, which felt like important information to be receiving while surrounded by corn in all directions.
Syracuse, Indiana — Oakwood Resort on Lake Wawasee
Some of our warranty work required us to be out of the motorhome for several nights while Newmar addressed systems that needed the coach completely empty. The company covered the cost of accommodations, and they put us up at the Oakwood Resort in Syracuse — a lakeside property on Lake Wawasee, the largest natural lake in Indiana. It was not a Westin. It was, however, exactly what we needed after three weeks of 5am train horns, 45-degree nights, and a parking lot for a backyard.
Every evening and every morning, the light on the lake was stunning — the kind of wide, calm, midwestern-sky beauty that coastal people sometimes overlook because it doesn’t have a mountain or an ocean attached. We took long hot baths. We slept past 6am. We had coffee on the balcony and watched the water. After so many months on the road, a few nights of stillness felt like a genuine luxury.
The warranty and maintenance work were originally scheduled for a week. Three weeks in a train-adjacent parking lot later, we were more than ready to move on — but the work was done right, and the motorhome that rolled out of Nappanee was in better shape than the one that had rolled in. Sometimes you have to earn the good miles.
Visitor Information
Erie KOA
The Erie KOA (6645 W. Lake Rd, Erie, PA) offers 50-amp service, full hookups, and easy access to both Presque Isle State Park (10 minutes) and downtown Erie. Pet-friendly. Internet is available but slow — plan accordingly. A good two-night base for the area.
Presque Isle State Park
Presque Isle State Park (301 Peninsula Dr, Erie, PA) is open year-round with a small vehicle access fee. The 13-mile perimeter road is open to cyclists and pedestrians along much of its length. The multi-use trail is excellent for biking, and the park has 11 distinct beaches ranging from calm swimming areas to more exposed lake-facing shores. Dogs are welcome on designated beaches in the off-season.
Cedarlane RV Park
Cedarlane RV Park (Port Clinton, OH) is a large, full-service park with 280+ sites near the Lake Erie shoreline. It fills quickly in summer and hosts seasonal events — call ahead to check for themed weekends if you’re particular about your campground atmosphere (or, like us, if you’d like to show up prepared with candy).
Amish Acres & Round Barn Theatre
Amish Acres (1600 W Market St, Nappanee, IN) offers shopping, a restaurant with traditional Amish family-style meals, and the Round Barn Theatre with a full schedule of performances. Ticket prices vary by production. The Amish Acres website has current show schedules. Reservations are recommended — shows sell out.
Newmar Factory & RV Parking
Newmar Corporation (1051 S Main St, Nappanee, IN) offers free factory tours (advance reservations via the Newmar website) and maintains an RV parking area with 50-amp hookups and sewer for owners bringing vehicles in for service. Parking is free; the area is functional rather than scenic. Bring earplugs.
Oakwood Resort
Oakwood Resort (700 Lakeview Dr, Syracuse, IN) sits on the shore of Lake Wawasee. It’s a comfortable lakeside property with good views and easy access to the lake. Syracuse is about 30 miles east of Nappanee and makes a good base if you want a quieter environment while visiting the Newmar/Elkhart area.
Practical Tips
Newmar warranty service: If you’re bringing a Newmar in for factory service, budget more time than you think you need. The work is thorough and well done, but scheduling can extend based on parts availability and the scope of what’s found during inspection. The free parking is a genuine amenity; the noise is a genuine tradeoff.
Presque Isle timing: The park is most crowded in summer. Fall visits offer smaller crowds, beautiful light, and excellent birding — Presque Isle is a significant stopover on fall migration routes for shorebirds and raptors. The lighthouse area and Sunset Point are worth prioritizing.
Elkhart for RV enthusiasts: Beyond the riverwalk, the RV/MH Hall of Fame (21565 Executive Pkwy, Elkhart) is worth a stop for anyone interested in the history of the industry. The collection spans from early camping trailers to modern coaches and includes rare vintage examples.
Amish country etiquette: When driving in the Nappanee and Goshen area, be patient and give wide berth to horse-drawn buggies on the road. Do not photograph Amish individuals without permission — many hold religious objections to being photographed, and the courtesy of asking is always appropriate.
Port Clinton Halloween: Cedarlane’s Halloween celebration is an annual event — the campground goes all out with decorations, organized activities, and live music. If you’re in the area in late October and enjoy that kind of communal campground fun, it’s worth timing your visit around it.
