Orlando Florida

We moved to the huge 850 site Thousand Trails campground on Wednesday. This park is always filled to capacity with snowbirds in the winter. Everyday some RV’s leave and are then replaced by new arrivals. The campground has a procedure in place that coordinates all the coming and going that works very well.

The process centers around a large wall map of the campground, an attendant constantly adjusts magnets to signify which sites are open or occupied. By order of arrival you get your pick of available sites. Most of us snowbirds have been here before and know what section we would like to be in, or which specific sites are better, or sometimes an area near friends. 

The challenge is going thru the check in process and getting a site of your choosing. Many people have strategies such as arriving at certain times of the day, or going into the campground early and making lists of sites that will be vacated on their check in day.

I no long practice any methodology; with all the coming and going which sites will be open when you get to the board is a big crap shoot! I just get there when I get there on our check in day, wait my turn and most of the time when it is my turn at the board there is a site in the area that we like.

Wednesday was no exception; the office had maybe 6 or 8 people milling about waiting for some specific site to open up. I walked up to the board, made a circle around our desired section and said I’d like something in this area. The whole area was covered in little round magnets indicating occupied sites. The board attendant pointed to one in the middle and said C-11 is open. I said, “I’ll take it.” Once again my no strategy approach worked perfectly. I left to move onto my site, leaving the pickier snowbirds still in the office looking bewildered.

Wednesday afternoon we walked over to the activity center and while we were standing there looking over the scheduled events a guy walked up and stuck 4 free admission tickets to the Tampa RV Show to the board and said help yourself.

We had planned on purchasing two new folding chairs and the Show seemed like a good place to look for them. The Tampa show is billed as The Super Show and it is something to experience. It is held at the state fairgrounds and fills the entire complex. It is the largest RV show I’ve ever seen. We paid a reasonable $6.00 for parking and found a parking space in the nether regions of the fairgrounds. We didn’t wait for the trolley but walked about a mile to the Show entrance where we did indeed get in free. 

We walked every isle of both vendor buildings looking for folding chairs. We didn’t find anything that suited us. One of the problems was we couldn’t try out a lot of the display models as they were occupied by people using them as a rest stop. Not that I can blame them, the place was filled with retired baby boomers, most of them not in good enough physical condition to walk the vast fair grounds.

We looked at a few of the Hundreds of RV’s but just as casual window shoppers. We like the layout of our Winnebago just fine and it being paid for even better! Other than lunch we purchased from one of the carnival food vendors we left with our wallets intact.

On the way home we stopped at the nearby LazyDays RV dealership which is or was at one time the largest RV dealership in the US. We were there for chairs, didn’t see any we liked and left. Down the interstate to the next exit we stopped at Campers World where we finally found what we were looking for and at a reasonable price. We purchased two chairs.

Speaking of chairs, in response to the picture of me we used in the first blog posting our friends Clay and Rebecca send this picture of Clay sitting in front of his motorhome in Stuyvesant Falls, New York.