If you’ve read John’s detailed posts on what we’re looking for in an RV: Gas vs. Diesel and Our path to choosing …, you know we’re looking for our next RV (already!) Now that we have our first RV Boomer (28ft FR3 gasser), we’ve caught the bug and are looking to upgrade to something a little larger that we can spend more time in. We both need to have the option to work, so something with ‘work space’ is important.
We currently live in Virginia Beach, and big RV shows are a little further away from us. There are a couple of RV show options in our immediate area, but they’re pretty small. So we headed to Richmond, VA yesterday to what we hoped would be a bigger show with more options. Bigger it was. Options? Meh.
What surprised us was the minimal number of Class A’s. And even more minimal number of Class A Diesels! I think we counted 6… We were happy to see 2 Newmars (a gasser and a diesel), a couple of Forest Rivers, and a Tiffin! Newmar’s and Tiffin’s are high on our list, so we were excited to see them in real life. Newmar’s are solid. What surprised us was the Tiffin 33aa that was on site. We had all but eliminated it from the options due to the seemingly lack of space, but once we saw it, we put it back on the list! The layout was perfect for us. The only issue is it is a little light on basement storage space. So maybe smaller than 35 footers will work!
A couple of other observations:
- There were no salesmen in sight! There was one in the Newmar (duh!) but I think we only saw one other.
- Travel trailers and 5th wheelers are popular! They were about 90% of the show.
- The show was held in a pretty small facility. We felt like sardines.
- It was still worth it for us – even though there weren’t many units for us, seeing the Tiffin opened up other smaller options for us that we had originally eliminated.
- There were more younger folks there than I’d have expected. RVing is not just for retirees anymore!
