Elkhart, Indiana, Harness Racing, And a New 5th Wheel

As cheesy as this may sound, many moons ago when I was a kid I read a book about county fair harness racing. Ever since I read that book, it was something I wanted to see in person but hadn’t had the chance. As it turns out, Indiana has a huge harness racing circuit and the week we were in Elkhart, the Elkhart County Fair was going on in Goshen, which was about 20 minutes or so from where we were staying. When I found that out, I immediately submitted a vacation request so we could go check it out.

These Midwestern 4H county fairs are really cool! And popular too! Goshen isn’t a very large town. Elkhart county doesn’t seem to have all that many residents. But, when we got there, it looked like they had enough parking for the entire state. And most of it was full! This surprised us because it was just a Tuesday afternoon. Anyway, harness racing. Turned out, it IS as cool as I always thought it would be. The jockeys ride in a little 2 wheeled buggy behind the horses. The horses are not allowed to gallup. They can only trot. If they break out of a trot they are disqualified. There is a pace car with big “wings” that keep the horses from passing it. It drives around the track and the jockeys try to get their horses as close to those wings as they can as they cross the starting line. Then the car pulls away and they’re off!
(As always, click on the image for the full version.)

I realized after the fact that I missed the perfect opportunity to make the word FART here. 🙁

Friday night, one of our old pool buddies who recently moved to Indiana drove up to see us! Jeff and his wife got a hotel nearby and we went to dinner Friday night and spent pretty much the whole day hanging out and exploring Saturday. We spent hours touring the Notre Dame campus. It was such a cool experience. And it was great to get to hang out with Jeff. We hadn’t seen him in ages.

Elkhart, Indiana is where they build about 90 to 95 percent of all travel trailers, 5th wheels, and motor homes in the U.S. We had been looking at pictures, watching videos, and reading reviews on 5th wheels for a while. We love the lifestyle and thought it would be nice to have a little bit more room and something easier to tow and set up. We knew we wanted to upgrade, but we had been thinking we would do it after the first of the year. We also thought Elkhart would be a good place to be able to look at several models and get an idea what it would be like. Also, we had never actually been inside a 5th wheel so we were curious.

The campground we stayed at had a dealership next door. We went to look. JUST TO LOOK. I swear! We had a couple of models in mind that we wanted to see and they also let us tour anything on the lot that we wanted to. We toured some that were waaaaay out of our price range and some that were way to heavy for our truck. Then we got to the ones we wanted to see. We immediately fell in love with the extra space and all the windows… So, we went back the next day to look at it again. We opened all the windows and sat in it for over an hour making a pros and cons list. Our pros list just kept growing. The only thing we could come up with to put on the cons list was that we would have a payment. The old one was paid off.

Then they dropped the price $11,000. Then offered us only $3,000 less than what we paid for our old one. The one we’d been living in for over a year. The price ended up being about $30,000 less than the same model was going for in Phoenix. (Which is where we originally planned to upgrade.) So, we went ahead and pulled the trigger. Then began the mad dash to get the 5th wheel hitch installed in the truck and move everything over from the old one once that was done. We just pulled the old one over to the dealership and parked them right next to each other and walked everything over. It was more work than we thought it was going to be! LOL

We’ve been in it a couple of months now and honestly do not regret the decision at all. We have a lot more room and so many more windows.

Our salesman was seriously one of the nicest guys ever. We still text back and forth from time to time. Jason, if you’re reading this we couldn’t be happier!