Hi, My wife and on purchased our 5th wheel in the Spring and have been loving it all summer. We reside in Upstate NY and want to be able to go to Florida at some point over the winter but not for the whole winter. More like a few weeks to a month a few times over the winter. My question is, when do you folks that reside in snowy climates haul your camper down? Do you take it South before the snow flies and store it somewhere you are planning on going? Do you wait for a break in the weather and get out of town? If you store it, any recommendations from SC on down? Any insight and tips and tricks would be greatly appreciated.
When we were still able to head south for our "winter tour" from our then Upstate NY base site, we left right after the New Year holiday in our Class A towing our car. Once or twice we had to shift our schedule by a day due to snow or ice on the roads, but that was rare. We took about 5 days of overnight stops to reach Georgia, usually staying at Ft McAllister State Park near Savannah for a few days before moving on to Crooked River State Park just north of the Florida line for a couple of weeks. After that we headed further south and spent a couple of weeks each at various Florida State Parks, Salt Springs Recreation Area, and sometimes Midway Campground on the Tamiami Trail (US 41) for the 10 day max allowed. We typically returned north to visit family sometime in April before starting on our "summer tour" of NY State Parks alternating with stays at our base site while remodeling our former summer cottage into a year round home as our "exit plan" when we had to hang up the keys. Now that we've had to mostly hang up the keys for medical reasons, our doctors and family have limited us to no more than 2 hours from home, so our travels are limited to a few area state parks. We visit them as much as we can fit medical appointments around them. We miss our winter trips south, but we do have 13 years of memories and photos to remind us of what was. Good luck on your winter adventures, and keep piling up those memories!
