Brooksville FMCA Rally – thumbs down!

Sweetwater Rv Park – Zephyrhills, Florida

We really didn’t feel like going anywhere yesterday, but wanted to attend some seminars at the FMCA rally in Brooksville, Florida.

We drove the 40 miles to Brooksville and  saw a lot of rv’s entering the airport where the rally was to be held.  We got to a security gate and were told the rally didn’t start until tomorrow.  Huh?  There were tons of rv’s going in?  Why couldn’t we?   We told the gatekeeper that the website showed a list of many activities and seminars for Tuesday.  He pulled out his activity sheet and he noted there were seminars scheduled, but said it didn’t start until the next day.  Okay, we get it.  It doesn’t start until the next day, but there were lots of people there and they had seminars scheduled all day.  Okay.

He said to go on in and ask someone inside.  We spoke to a lovely??? lady who happened to have my maiden name and she  insisted the rally didn’t start until Wednesday and we could NOT attend the seminars.   She was the webmaster.  I explained that since there were seminars, we assumed we could attend, but she kept saying the day pass people were not allowed in until Wednesday.  

Maybe we’re stupid, but in reading the website, I didn’t understand that.  The sefmca website wasn’t put together well in my opinion as far as info on the rally.  You had to go to several pages to get the info needed for the rally. There was a map but no address.  You had to go somewhere else to find an address to put into the GPS and I wasn’t even sure if that was the correct address for the rally.  If you check the schedule, you will see seminars starting on January 31st.   There was a page that said “Go Western at SEA”…which I assumed they were all going on a cruise together, so I didn’t click that link.  Somewhere buried in there was the date of the rally which was Feb 2 thru 6th.  How many of you know the date?  I just figured it was Tuesday, there were seminars on Tuesday, and we would go if  we paid the $7 daily rate.    Wrong!

A very nice gentleman happened to overhear the conversation with the webmaster lady.  He sided with us and told the woman that “we have membership that is declining and we are trying to increase it and what do we do, but make people mad.”   He said the same thing happened last year and they pissed a lot of people off.  I told them that we were FMCA members, but she just walked away and said we could come back tomorrow. 

I don’t know if we’ll go back or not.  We certainly got a bad taste in our mouth for FMCA.  We would like to see the Picasa seminar by Geeks on Tour, and Mac the Fire Guy, but I really don’t want to give that organization another dime of my money.

I guess this was another learning lesson.  We have never been to a rally and evidently they have additional days set aside for people that are there with their rv’s.     They have another one in Perry, Georgia next month.  I wonder if it’s run by the same group? 

We may  go back tomorrow…..still po’d and undecided!