After leaving our winter home at St. Lucie West Motorcoach Resort, we pointed the rig north and made our first stop in Ocala at Ocala Sun RV Resort — a large, clean, well-maintained park with easy
access to some of central Florida's best attractions. You could easily use it as a base camp for Ocala's famed horse country, a day trip to Disney an hour to the south, or a run up to Gainesville about 40 miles north. We were only there a few days, though, so we kept it simple and made a beeline for Silver Springs State Park and its legendary glass-bottom boat tour — hoping to spot the famous rhesus monkeys along the way.
The monkeys didn't cooperate, but the tour more than delivered. The springs are strikingly beautiful — the water so clear it looks like glass, with lush subtropical scenery framing every bend of the river. It was genuinely one of the more memorable things we've done on the road. You can read more about that experience here.
On the campground itself: Ocala Sun is very big-rig friendly. The pull-throughs are long and generous — in fact, when we arrived they were in the final stages of combining back-to-back sites into extra-long pull-throughs. We could have easily parked a vehicle on each side of the motorhome and still had room to spare.
Amenities include a pool and spa, a gated dog park, shuffleboard, horseshoes, and pickleball. My one gripe as a solo pickleballer is that I couldn't find any organized times or drop-in play — if they do run something, I wasn't aware of it and it wasn't posted anywhere obvious. Not a dealbreaker, but worth knowing if you're hoping to pick up a game.
One thing I do pay attention to is walkability, and Ocala Sun scores well there. All the roads are paved — a small thing that makes a big difference when you're trying to log some miles without grinding your sneakers into gravel. The park is also large enough that you're not doing endless laps around the same loop just to hit your step count. I didn't bother with the campground WiFi since we had clear skies and our Starlink worked perfectly.
The one hiccup during our stay came during setup. While backing into our original site, the blacktop crumbled under the weight of the rig. Fortunately, Donna caught it happening and called out before anything was damaged. The staff responded quickly, moved us to a new site without any hassle, and we had no issues from there. Whether it was a thin asphalt layer or a weak base, that spot just wasn't ready for a rig of our size — but the way the park handled it left a good impression.
All in all, Ocala Sun is a solid stop. It sits in a sweet spot geographically — a natural halfway point between Port St. Lucie and Buena Vista Motorcoach Resort — so it's likely we'll be back. When we are, we'll have a longer list of things to check off. And we'll definitely be making another run at those monkeys.
