Dealer parking only: about five spaces for hundreds of dealers!

EXIT 76 Antiques is located off, ah, you guessed it, EXIT 76 on I-65 about 30 miles south of Indianapolis. We have recently rented a booth at this popular antique mall. The place is huge, with over 70,000 SF of climate controlled space. There are literally hundreds of dealers and booths. The nice thing about this establishment is both the number and quality of the people who work there. There are always staff walking around, opening locked cases for customers as well as being an added security measure above and beyond the CCTV.

The staff is now used to our showing up with our RV and parking for a while not only while we unload things to stock our booth, but to also stick around awhile. If we are going to be there long, I don’t park in one of the limited number of spaces for dealers.

The Entrance to the antique mall

There are some basic bits of information you need to know about setting up for cheap camping at a festival, fair or flea market. First, most flea markets are two days only, normally Saturday and Sunday. Fairs are almost always at least a week, while festivals can be anywhere from three to ten days. We prefer the festivals.

This past August we hit four events in a row. We stayed a week at each, and in two out of four cases we only paid for the vendor spots, even though we were at each location longer than the four days of the event.

For example, we arrived at one festival on Monday, paid our $40 for the Thursday – Sunday festival, and had 20 AMP electric and city water hookups. We had six nights of camping for $40. On the subject of utilities, most places will have electric only. And, this is usually a 20 AMP

A good festival set up with electric and water

service. Some may have water, you will probably never find sewer hookups.

You won’t be at a fancy campground with a pool or miniature golf, but you will have fun talking with your customers and fellow vendors. You can trade your wares for food from the concession folks, and maybe find some other items to get to sell at a later show. Do some research online for festivals in your travel range. Let me know if I can answer questions you may have.

Sher broached the subject of paying for camping and gas with our 3F fund in this post. Allow me to expand a bit on that topic.

Starcraft behind two 10′ vendor spaces

A typical vendor space at a flea market, festival or fair is rented in 10′ increments. (Our canopies/tents are 10 x 10) With our old Starcraft trailer we could get by with a 20′ space. We would park the trailer in the back of the space, and then have room to set up our canopies in front of the trailer.

The Hideout behind a 30′ space with two canopies and 10′ open selling area.

With the Hideout we now usually have to get a 30′ spot with the same layout. Sometimes when the spots are deep, we can still rent 20′ with the trailer taking one 10′ and the canopies taking the other 10′.

20′ space w/Hideout: We could have set up two canopies if we wanted to.

I’ll post another article about how to use a flea market or festival as a way to camp for cheap, have some fun, and maybe even make a a buck or two!

The reason we first went to a flea market was to have something to do.  Very simple.  We were looking for things to do and me, being an almost extreme couponer had an over abundance of health and beauty supplies.

So we head to a Wednesday morning flea market called White’s in Brookville, Indiana.  What we found was that we could come over on Tuesday and set up our things to sell.  Hey!  Did we just get a free night of camping?  Now this was 2 years before we went full time in Roadtirement so we didn’t quite grasp the impact of what we had found.  We only had to pay for our flea market space and $5 for the use of electricity.

Excitedly we made back the money for our expenses plus paid for our gas coming and going and we had a ball meeting and talking with people.

Gas and campgrounds can be expensive.  That is our biggest expense on this Roadtirement adventure.  There isn’t much we can do about gas prices, we have to have gas and we have to pay for it.

Maj and I have found solutions for both.  We have a 3F fund, which is the flea markets, festivals and fairs that we use to pay for our gas.  More coming about that.

Camping we use a variety of methods including our 3F and Passport America membership.  We have to be creative with where we park our trailer.  We will share them as we find them and as other Roadtirees  share with us.