On The Meandering Road: January 13, 2016

It was nice, crispy morning when we set out to attend 2016 Florida RV Supershow at Florida State Fairgrounds. It was a walking distance from where we parked our Lil’ Home (LH). The parking lots were pretty much empty when we walked by around 9:30 am.

Newmar Buddy Rally Campground

Since we signed up for the rally we were given tickets for the RV show that are good for everyday until January 17th. We can go anytime we want, when we feel like.

We went to the open lot where most motorcoaches, travel trailers, 5th wheel trailers, etc were displayed. We wanted to see what 2015 Newmar Ventana was like. The bathroom is in the back of the bedroom while ours is between the living and bedroom area. The front seats were not as cushy or comfortable as ours. We checked out Newmar’s top of the line models: Essex, London Aire, King Aire and Mountain Aire. All are priced over $400k.

Spartan Diesel Pusher Chassis
This is what we have in our Lil' Home

Four Winds Class C
We ALMOST bought this one before we got LH

Back Porch

It has a small bathroom by the back porch

We then went inside Building “A” to check out booths. There was one booth that we wanted to go to to get information on shades for the windshield and side windows. Magna Shade did not have them on hand, but we can order it and it will take 4 weeks before we get it. It is out of our budget for now, but we will definitely want to order later. We can use one of Edith's pictures and it has to be in high resolution and it will be tough to pick out just one out of thousands and thousands Edith has in her external hard drive.

Airstream travel trailers

There were several booths advertising RV lots/combo homes. One in Tennessee has a new development where there is a garage big enough for two cars and RV with 50 amps hook-up. The floor plan looks very nice and roomy, but we don’t want to live in TN.

Not too many freebies to be had, but there were plenty of candy dishes. Edith loves Tootsie Rolls and Erwin grabbed some and gave them to her. He is not helping her with her eating habit. :-(

We did not take a peek inside Prevost buses that are valued over $1 Million dollars. Shoes are not allowed, so people will have to take off shoes before they can go inside the bus. There was one bus that is at least $2.3 Million dollars. Very fancy and too glamorous all around. Too glamorous for our taste. We might go inside later this week.

We also checked out Roadtrek camper vans. Not much change since 2013 when we first owned a new one before we upgraded to LH. For the price we got for LH we get more $ out of each square footage than Roadtrek. However, Roadtrek is easy to get around, can go stealth easily when boondocking in cities/towns. While there a salesman, Craig, came out of one Roadtrek models, saw Edith and started talking to her. Then he stopped and looked at her quietly, then said “ You look familiar, do I know you?”. He suddenly recognized us when he saw Erwin coming up. It was him who sold us the camper van back in November 2013. He asked us if we still have it. “No, we upgraded it to Class A”, Erwin replied. We talked a while before we continued browsing.

The place was packed like sardines in a can. It is Wednesday and you can imagine how very crowded it can be come this weekend!

We were hungry, did not want to order sandwiches at concessions. At 2 pm we hopped on the tram, got off near the rally campground. While going by the parking lots all were FULL!

After lunch we relaxed a bit, drank lots of water. We forgot to bring bottles of water with us to the RV show this morning. Lucky for us there were water fountains in the building. A bottle of water at one concessions sells for $3!!!!!

It was 4 pm when we walked back to the RV rally show. The parking lots started to thin out little by little. Inside the showroom plenty of room to move around. Erwin wanted to try different LED light bulbs, decided to buy two. We wanted to find Jayco 5th wheel trailers, but they were way way in the back of the lot and the sky started to darken a bit. We went back to the campground.