Hi All! Hope everyone is having a wonderful start to their week 🙂 I just wanted to pop on here quickly to share with you guys how my experience was going to the Suncoast Tiny House Festival in Pinellas Park, FL a few weeks ago. I had been looking forward to this event for months! I had seen an ad for it when I was really starting to get into tiny house researching back last autumn. In the ad, it showed a bunch of tiny houses in the 20’-32’ range. I thought of it as a way to really get up close and personal with my tiny home vision since I still had yet to see a real one, I have only seen them on websites and videos.

The morning I left to head down south (the festival was about an hour and a half away from where I’m living) it was beautiful and sunny out. I was feeling ecstatic. It felt like I had been waiting to go to this festival for eons, it had been a few months since I got tickets for the event and the months seemed to drag on. My mom and son came along too, I’m really thankful she was able to help watch him because it would have been a lot of work if I had gone alone with him and try to see all that I wanted to. Although…as it turned out, there wasn’t that much to see!

Right before we got to the parking area for the event, my gas light came on so I stopped to get gas, but as we drove by the event on the way to the gas station, all I could see was school buses. If you didn’t know, there is another alternative lifestyle with tiny home living where people live on school buses by transforming them into a “schoolie.” It has more of an RV or fifth-wheel feel to them and while they’re super neat, it’s not what I’m into at all. As I drove by though, that is literally all I could see and then I saw a couple small 16-foot tiny homes, also though…not what I am not into. I felt a sinking feeling of disappointment, but my mom kept things positive by pointing out at least we were checking out a new area of Florida and it was a gorgeous day.

After fueling up and heading back to the event, I thought…maybe there are more tiny homes on the other side of the field that I hadn’t noticed before during the quick drive-by. But, that soon dissipated as we got closer and closer to the staff that took our tickets, they stood next to a giant chalkboard that stated “There are 40 school buses and 4 tiny homes at today’s event.” I kept thinking what a sham it was that they named it a “Tiny Home” fest, why not name it a “Schoolie” fest, which it actually was!

Despite the crushing disappointment of not getting to see a 24’-30’ size tiny home, which is what I’m actually looking for, there were some silver linings in getting some more information about tiny homes. I met a couple of inspiring women who shared their stories of their tiny home journeys. One of them had her 16’ tiny home available for us to walk through and the other one was selling her book about her and her partner’s tiny home journey (see photo below), which I will write a book review on soon…along with another tiny home book I’m reading at the moment! So not all was lost and my tiny home journey will go on 🙂