Tiffin Allegro Club Rally, Sarasota, FL

We are attending our second Tiffin Allegro Club rally in Sarasota, FL. Our first was in Orlando last year. The Allegro Club is the factory-sponsored club for Tiffin Motor Home owners. They have about a half dozen rallies across the country each year. They are usually quite large and this one turned out to be the largest so far. The RVing community is pretty social and there are several large clubs that bring people together. At the higher level are the manufacturer’s clubs and RVing association clubs. Tiffin and Winnebago clubs are an example of the former, and the Family Motor Coach Association and Good Sam’s Club are examples of the latter. There are many others in each category. These larger clubs have subchapters, which cater to regions of the country or special interests.

Every available space inside the fence was taken up by coaches.

Pretty tight spacing. No room for awnings.

Our attraction to the Tiffin Allegro Club rallies is part social and part practical. We enjoy meeting friends we have met on the road, and there are forums where we learn more about our coach and its subsystems. We also gain tips on how to travel and camp more comfortably. A big benefit of attending a Tiffin rally is that the manufacturer brings technicians that will perform three minor repairs to each RV at no charge. That is a big benefit. Scheduling and driving some distance for small repairs can actually become time consuming and expensive. I had an air conditioner repaired, two water inlet fittings replaced, and the cable TV input fitting repaired. Tiffin also brought technicians from the Lippert Company to perform a recall on the retracting steps leading into the coach. This saves scheduling and traveling to a dealer to have that modification done, and right now in Florida the lead time for a maintenance appointment is in the neighborhood of two months. Thank You, Tiffin!

Kirk and Phil were great guys and fixed my A/C. Thanks for your service, Kirk.

Approximately three hundred and fifty Tiffin motorhomes were at the rally. For the most part there are two people in each one, so it got crowded at mealtime. It is hard to feed that many people and have a quality meal. The breakfast buffet was fine, but let’s just say the evening meals were nothing special. The Sarasota Military Academy provided the student-servers and they did a bang up job serving this very large crowd.

A (not so) quiet evening with 700 of our closest friends.

You might wonder where you could hold such a big gathering. In this case it is the Sarasota Fairgrounds, and it turned out to be well suited to the task. There was sufficient parking for all of the motorhomes, as well as the sixteen 2016 coaches Lazy Days brought to display (they sold or got orders for over a dozen for their trouble). There were buildings for the forums and a large arena for meals. All in all it went well. The size of the event is a little outside our comfort zone, so we will not do this often. The smaller events put on by the subchapters are more to our liking, particularly those of the FMCA Four-Wheelers out west. We plan to join them for off-roading adventures in Spearfish, SD and Moab, UT this year so watch this space this fall. We also belong to the Suncoast Allegro chapter and we will be enjoying getting together with them four times this winter here in Florida.

Winfred Durand put together a video that shows the scope of this event:

 https://www.youtube.com/embed/kN9cl-2T3Bs

It wasn’t all about motorhomes. We managed to meet close friends of Barbara’s for lunch. It was worth the fight in traffic to join Tom and Sharon Smith for lunch at their beautiful home on Long Boat Key.