On January 13, we packed up and left Wekiva Falls, heading over to Southern Aire RV Resort a few miles northeast of Tampa for the 2016 RV Supershow. Since the Supershow is billed as the largest RV show in the USA, and it’s also where, several years ago, we figured out that the Montana 3400RL was the floorplan we were most in love with, we wanted to browse around the various fifth wheels on offer to get an idea of what we might want down the road when it comes time to trade in the Montana. We decided to split our visit into two different days: one to spend going through the vendor buildings, and the second to actually check out the RVs themselves.

Thursday in the vendor buildings was interesting but sadly a bit of a disappointment compared to past years. Most of the vendors were just general salespeople from various RV dealerships around the general area hawking products, with only a handful of the vendors being actual reps from the products’ parent companies. We did pick up a bunch of travel brochures for our plans this summer, and we found ourselves a bit intrigued by one vendor booth from a company called Harvest Hosts, that touted, “stay overnight for free at farms and wineries”. Now as those closest to me may know, I’ve always been an animal lover and I definitely enjoy a good glass of wine or two (or three!) in the evening, so I grabbed a copy of their pamphlet and made a mental note to look into the business. After doing a bit of online research, we realized a membership in Harvest Hosts would be a great thing for us. Pay $44 for a year (plus 3 bonus months for joining at the Supershow) and over 500 farms, wineries, distilleries, and museums around North America will allow us to dry camp for no cost on their property overnight. All they ask is that we patronize their business while we’re there, something we would do anyway when dry camping. So we decided to join and occasionally spend our money supporting small businesses instead of buying our wine and produce (or other farm products) at the big box stores all the time.

Saturday was for going through the RVs at the Supershow, and we must have checked out practically every well-made brand of fifth wheel and toyhauler there. Most of the ones we looked at were not exactly what we were looking for, but one in particular stood out – the Jayco Pinnacle 36KPTS. It’s a bit bigger than the Montana that we currently have, but it seemed to suit us very well. We’ll definitely keep it in mind over the next few years and see what happens.

We stayed another week at Southern Aire so Lewis could get some work done and we could relax a bit, then off we went on January 23 to Torreya State Park up in the Florida Panhandle. It was just an overnight stop for us on the way to Mobile, Alabama, so we had booked it online instead of over the phone like we usually like to do with campgrounds. It turned out to be a mistake. Even though the picture of the campsite looked great and the campsite we chose could supposedly take up to a 60’ RV (we’re only 37’4”), when we arrived we were greeted by a two foot-wide tree growing dead smack in the middle of the entrance to the campsite we had reserved. Somehow that tree had not been visible in the picture online, but there was no way we were getting our Montana into that site, as there was very limited room to maneuver on the campground road for backing around the tree and into the site. No rangers were anywhere to be found and the campground office wasn’t open even though it should have been, so we decided to take the $23.90 we’d spent on the reservation as a loss and head for another campground, Florida Springs RV Park, about an hour down the highway. And that’s where we sit tonight, before we continue our journey to Mobile in the morning.