FMCA hosted its 100th International Convention & RV Expo August 14 through 17 2019, in Minot, North Dakota, at the North Dakota State Fairgrounds. Over 1,700 RVs were in attendance!
First Time attendees!
The town of Minot was excited to have FMCA there, the first night they had blocked some of the downtown streets, where they had live music, food trucks, classic cars with a shuttle service provided to downtown.
I thought that the Orange/White car should have been a Whataburger car !
(it had A&W food stuff on the window food tray)
We are glad our friends Paul & Lynn and others in the AIM club suggested we attend this conference - being newbies to RVing we got a lot out of it. Like any other conference I've attended, there were a few not so good sessions, but most were good and I always got some new learning/tidbit of info to help us newbie RVers. John went to a lot of mechanical/technical sessions and thought those were very good.
They also had 'craft' sessions, so Lynn & I decided to sign up to make these Iris's - something we can keep on the coach but don't have to water.. LOL.
They also had 'craft' sessions, so Lynn & I decided to sign up to make these Iris's - something we can keep on the coach but don't have to water.. LOL.
We even went to Catholic Mass at the convention!
A few FMCA members worked with the Minot Catholic parish to have the priest come celebrate mass with us in one of the seminar rooms at the convention center - very nice! They had also made donation envelopes which I thought were quite clever with the wording. A non denominational service was also offered.
There was lots of entertainment throughout the event, including lots of live music, which we always enjoy, The Spinners performed one night - a member of the original band still performing with them.
Captain "Sully" also spoke one night.
Our RVs were lined up in every other parking spot on the gravel lots ( our AIM club parked together) - It started out a bit muddy in parking spots after the recent rain in Minot, but thankfully dried up pretty well. We had space across the road to park our Jeep so we made the most of our vacant spot with our outdoor setup & propane fire pit where we hung out with other RVers from our AIM club and a couple we met at a Harvest host in South Dakota that surprised us with a visit when they decided to stop over in Minot & FMCA. One night we had multiple instant-pots cooking ribs, that John finished on the grill - yum!
Kudos to National Indoor RV Center(NIRVC) & the AIM club, as 3 of the four nights of the convention they set up tents and cookers in our AIM RV row and served us dinner!
The vendors did very well in the exhibit hall, most running out of stuff the they were selling by the third day! And we bought our share as well - LOL.
Funniest story- Roadmaster sells an RV spare tire hitch you can put on the back of your RV - pretty nice setup (the sales guy was camping behind us). He told us a story of this petite lady that came up to him and said she wanted one and her husband who was with her said he didn’t need it. She asked her husband to “Tell him where you keep the spare” Husband says: “on the roof of the RV" She’s says “tell him how your going to get it down”. Husband says: “ I’m going to throw it down and she can stop it once /if it bounces/rolls..” OMG!!!! He had put the spare up there with a tractor! Needless to say - they bought the spare tire trailer hitch and Roadmaster found someone to get the spare tire off the roof to put on the hitch.
FMCA Benefit: The picture from the photo prop above is probably the only time you will see me in the drivers window of a motorcoach - LOL. As many of you know, I haven’t driven, nor do I have any plans to drive our coach. When people ask me what happens if there’s an emergency and John can’t drive, I tell them “My plan” is to disconnect the Jeep and drive it - I’ll leave the coach where it is and worry about the coach later.
-->> Well, guess what - Thanks to FMCA I have a better plan now
We discovered that one of the benefits with our annual FMCA membership is that if something were to happen where John wasn’t able to drive the coach ( I pray that never happens), FMCA Assist will send a driver to drive our coach back home for us. What a great benefit!
Our last day in Minot (post conf) we went to their Food Truck event
A Texas BBQ Food truck in North Dakota!
A beautiful day to relax before we hit the road again..
and time to figure out "Where2Next?"
On our way to Minot - we went through a 10+ mile section of road that was completely torn up... something they seem to do up North vs fixing one side while temporarily routing the traffic on a real/temp road on the other side. Our towed Jeep looked like we had gone mudding in it after that drive, fortunately the coach didn't look that bad.
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