The Hershey RV Show finally ended yesterday, and it was the longest week of our lives. We are so glad that it is over! We have worked a lot of RV rallies over the years, but this was our first RV show. I’m pretty sure it will be our last, too.

The good news is that, according to the folks running the Hershey Show, they had record attendance. Uh huh. Here is a picture of the vendor aisle where our booth was yesterday about mid-morning. Sunday was supposed to be the other “super busy day” of the rally. Does this look familiar? If not, look at my last couple of blog posts. Oh yeah, another record setting attendance day!

My friend Al Hesselbart from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart was displaying this really cool 1915 Model A camper at the show. Pretty cool, huh?

Al set a record of his own at the show yesterday morning, when absolutely nobody showed up for his always popular 100 Years of RVs seminar. I didn’t want Al to feel too bad about that, so I also had nobody at all at my Meandering Down The Highway seminar at 2:30 p.m. 

After about 15 minutes of sitting in the room alone, I began packing up my computer and projector, and one of the show dweebs poked her head inside and told me I had to stay in the room in case anybody did eventually did show up.  Well, you know how well that worked out, don’t you?

The show was supposed to end at 5 p.m., and vendors were not allowed to start packing up until then. But there were no customers and we were way past fed up, so I went back to our booth and we started packing things away and taking them out to the van.

We were about finished when another show representative came by and told us that we were breaking their rules by leaving early. Yeah, and your point is?

In looking over our totals for the show, we have taken in much more money on the very first day of many RV rallies with only a few hundred RVs attending than we did in our week at the “biggest RV show in the world!

While the show was a total bust, we could have lived with that if the folks putting on the event were more organized, and treated their vendors with some respect. But when they have so many rules that even they can’t agree on them; when you arrive and get a hassle just to get your name badges and parking permits; when nobody can tell you even the most basic information about where to park to unload your inventory; when they  treat you like an idiot and blow smoke up your butt about the numbers, it’s just too much to deal with.

But at least it’s over, and we’ll spend today licking our wounds and getting some much needed rest. We have a few more days here at the Hershey Thousand Trails campground, and then we’re going to Gettysburg for a couple of days before we continue on to Washington, D.C.

Somebody e-mailed me to say that they were sorry to hear that we would not be returning to this area because the show was a bust, because there is so much to see and do here that we would enjoy. No problem, we love this area and we will be back again for sure. We will just spend our time exploring and having fun, not stuck at the RV show.

Thought For The Day – It’s hard to be nostalgic when you can’t remember anything.