The Hershey Crowds Were Real. So Is the RV Slump.

RV PODCAST NEWS EDITION

Monday, September 21, 2026

OPEN

Hello, everyone. I am Mike Wendland, and this is the Monday RV Podcast News Edition for Sept. 21, 2026.

This is one of two RV Podcast episodes we do every week.

This one publishes at 6 a.m. every Monday with the biggest news stories affecting the RV lifestyle.

Then, on Wednesday, Jennifer joins me for our Stories from the Road edition, where we have interviews, share RV lifestyle tips and travel ideas, and answer your questions.

Before we get to the news, one date to put on your calendar.

On Thursday, Oct. 8, I am teaching our End-of-Season RV Shutdown Workshop. It is live, and it walks you through the complete shutdown process for your rig, with particular attention to the plumbing system, which is where an expensive winter mistake usually happens.

If you have ever opened up in the spring and found a split water line, a cracked fitting or a pump that will not prime, this is the workshop that keeps that from happening again.

You can sign up at RVLifestyle.com/workshop. We will have that link in the show notes too. Again, RVLifestyle.com/workshop. Seats go fast so get yours now $10. RVLifestyle.com/workshop

I am a journalist by training. More than 40 years working for big city newspapers, television stations and the networks. That is where I learned to source every story I do, and that is what we do here.

We came up in the news business, and old habits die hard. We source our stories, we check the numbers, and we try to separate what actually happened from what the press releases want you to believe happened.

You will find links to every story we report at the very end of the transcript for this episode at RVPodcast.com. Go to the show notes page, click the Transcript tab, and scroll all the way to the bottom.

Now, here is the RV news of the week.

STORY 1: HERSHEY DREW A CROWD. THE INDUSTRY IS STILL SHRINKING.

America's Largest RV Show wrapped up yesterday in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Five days. Nearly 1,500 RVs. Forty manufacturers. About 200 vendor booths spread across the Giant Center and the parking lots around it.

And a lot of people walked through the gates.

Opening day drew 7,322 people, according to the Pennsylvania RV and Camping Association, which puts on the show. That is the biggest first day since 2021, and it is up about 800 people from last year.

Heather Leach, the association's executive director, said they were really pleased with the turnout, and that presale tickets were running slightly ahead of last year.

Now here is where we put on the reporter hat.

A big crowd at an RV show is not the same thing as a healthy RV industry. Those two things are being blended together this week, and they should not be.

Because at the same time all those people were walking the lots at Hershey, the RV Industry Association's own numbers were telling a very different story.

The association's summer forecast projects about 314,000 wholesale shipments for 2026. That is down roughly 8 percent from last year.

And the actual shipments have been running worse than the forecast. Through July, the most recent month reported, wholesale shipments were down almost 14 percent from the same period a year ago. July was the weakest July for RV shipments since at least 2015.

Motorhomes took the worst of it. Motorhome shipments were down more than 25 percent in July alone.

So what do you make of a well-attended show in a down market?

We think the answer is pretty simple, and it is not the answer the industry wants.

Interest in the RV lifestyle is not the problem. People still want to travel this way. The problem is the price of a new RV, the cost of financing one, and the fact that dealers are still sitting on units from two model years.

That last part is the opportunity for you.

A show like Hershey is where dealers move leftover inventory, and this year they had a lot of it to move. If you were there, or if you are headed to a fall show near you, the discounts are real.

But so are the traps.

First, get the complete out-the-door price in writing before you talk about a monthly payment. Freight, prep, documentation fees and dealer add-ons are where a good deal quietly stops being a good deal.

Second, arrange your financing before you walk in. Know what rate you qualify for. The finance office is a profit center, not a favor.

Third, do not let a show deadline rush you. A price that expires at 5 p.m. Sunday usually reappears in October.

And fourth, check the model year on the sticker, not the brochure. A deeply discounted 2025 unit can be a terrific buy, but you should know that is what you are buying.

The full attendance total for the five days had not been released as of our recording time. We will report it when it comes out.

STORY 2: ONE RV MAKER FINALLY OPENS THE DOOR

Next week is the biggest week of the year in Elkhart, Indiana.

The 2026 Elkhart RV Open House runs Sept. 28 through Oct. 2. Thor Industries, Forest River, Winnebago and dozens of other manufacturers and suppliers roll out their 2027 product lines.

Thor President and CEO Bob Martin calls it the premier time to present a complete lineup. Forest River CEO Doug Gaeddert calls it the industry's annual family gathering and says it is a blast every year.

And for more than a decade, it has been closed to the people who actually buy the RVs.

Open House is a dealer event. If you do not have a dealer badge or a press credential, you do not get in.

This year, one company is changing that.

Alliance RV is opening its Open House display to the public for the first time.

Dealers get the first two days. Then the doors open to anyone who wants to walk in, starting at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 30, running all day Thursday, Oct. 1, and until 3 p.m. Friday, Oct. 2, at the Alliance campus, Plant 2, in Elkhart.

It is free. There is no registration.

More than 40 floorplans will be on display, including at least 10 new ones and two brand-new Alliance product lines. They will also have the Midwest Automotive Designs Class B vans, the Mercedes and Ford conversions from the company Alliance acquired.

Here is what Alliance co-founder Coley Brady said about it: "Our Open House has always been where we show dealers what's next, and opening it up to the public just felt like the right thing to do."

And then he said this: "The people buying these RVs are the ones whose feedback shapes them. We want them walking through the units, opening the drawers and telling us what they think."

We have been arguing for this for years on this program.

The people who live in these rigs, who deal with the water leaks and the bad storage layouts and the cabinet doors that fly open on a mountain grade, are the best quality control the industry has, and they have been locked out of the room where next year's product gets shown.

Alliance just unlocked it.

Will anybody follow? As of our recording, no other manufacturer has announced public hours for Open House week. We would love to be proven wrong on that, and we will report it if we are.

What this means for you is straightforward. If you are within driving distance of Elkhart, this is a free look at 2027 product with nobody trying to close you on a payment.

And if something is wrong with a floorplan, tell them. That is the whole point.

MIDROLL: RVCOMMUNITY

Let me take a break here, because I want to tell you about something that has changed, and most people have not noticed it yet.

We run one of the biggest RV groups on Facebook. More than 600,000 members.

Here is what almost nobody understands about that number.

When somebody in that group posts a question, 600,000 people do not see it. Not even close.

Facebook decides who sees it. An algorithm looks at the post, makes a guess about who might react to it, and shows it to a fraction of the members. Everybody else never knows it was there.

You can write the single most useful thing anybody posted all week, and most of that group will never lay eyes on it.

That is not a complaint about our group. That is how every Facebook group works now. The reach belongs to Facebook, not to the members and not to us.

We saw the handwriting on the wall months ago.

That is exactly why we built RVCommunity.

RVCommunity.com is our own platform. No algorithm. Nothing standing between your question and the people who can answer it. When you ask about a campground, a tow rating, or a water heater that will not light, the members see it. All of them. That is the entire point.

No ads. No sponsored posts. Nobody sliding into your thread to sell you an extended warranty.

There are three levels. Core, Insider and Roadmaster. Roadmaster includes our RV Lifestyle Masterclass, eight modules and 30 lessons, plus free books and travel guides.

If you have ever posted something in a Facebook group and wondered why nobody answered you, now you know why.

Come see what we built instead, at RVCommunity.com.

That is RVCommunity.com.

STORY 3: THE GOVERNMENT IS EYEING PUBLIC LAND FOR DATA CENTERS

If you boondock on public land out West, pay attention to this one.

The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing at least 12 proposals to build artificial intelligence data centers and related infrastructure on public land.

The projects are spread across six states: Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming. Together they cover at least 17,600 acres.

The largest is a proposed 10,200-acre project near Green River, Utah, from a nuclear power startup called Valar Atomics, which wants to pair data centers with small nuclear reactors.

This was reported by The Washington Sun, which obtained records from the agency. BLM state directors put together lists of candidate sites for Interior Department leadership.

Now let us be careful here, because this story is early and there are real limits to what we know.

Almost all of these proposals are at the earliest stage. The documents are not posted on the BLM website. The environmental review process, which is where the public normally gets to see maps and file comments, has not started for most of them.

Exactly one data center on public land has been approved so far, in Boulder City, Nevada, and an Interior Department judge has put that one on hold while a legal challenge plays out.

BLM says the projects will be evaluated so that environmental impacts are, in the agency's words, "understood, disclosed and appropriately addressed."

So what does this mean to you, out there in a rig with a solar panel and a full fresh water tank?

Start with the scale. BLM manages 245 million acres. Seventeen thousand acres is a rounding error against that.

But acreage is not really the question. The question is which acres, and what a data center needs to operate.

They need water. They need transmission lines. They need roads. And they tend to get sited on flat, open, lower-elevation ground near existing power corridors, which describes a great deal of the dispersed camping country in Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

We do not yet know whether any of these parcels are places people camp. Nobody outside the agency does, because the maps are not public.

We will keep watching for those notices and we will tell you when they post.

STORY 4: THE LIPPERT AND PATRICK MERGER HITS A DELAY

Back in June, two Elkhart companies announced they were combining into one.

Patrick Industries and LCI Industries, the parent company of Lippert, agreed to an all-stock merger. Combined revenue of roughly $8.1 billion. Headquarters in Elkhart. Andy Nemeth of Patrick running the new company. More than $150 million in cost savings promised within three years, and a closing expected in the first half of next year.

If those names do not mean much to you, they should.

Between them, Lippert and Patrick make the parts your RV is built out of. Frames. Axles. Slide-out mechanisms. Leveling systems. Awnings. Doors. Windows. Furniture. Countertops. Steps. Suspension.

You may have never bought anything with their name on the box. You are almost certainly sitting in their products every time you camp.

Now, the news.

On Aug. 5, the two companies filed their required premerger notification with the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. That filing starts a 30-day clock. When the clock runs out, the deal can close.

On Sept. 9, they pulled that filing back and refiled it.

That restarts the clock from zero. Patrick disclosed the move in a securities filing the following day, and both companies say the merger is still moving forward.

So here is the honest read, and we want to be careful with it.

A voluntary withdraw-and-refile is a routine maneuver. Companies do it when the reviewing agency is not finished in 30 days and everybody would rather reset the clock than trigger a formal demand for more documents. It happens in plenty of deals that go on to close without a problem.

But it is not nothing.

What it tells you for certain is that somebody at Justice or the FTC was not done looking after 30 days. That is the entire reason the maneuver exists.

And the thing worth looking at is the one the press releases do not mention: how much of the RV parts business one company would control.

Patrick brings about 85 brands and roughly 10,000 U.S. employees. Lippert brings about 12,500 employees and more than 140 facilities. Neither company has published a market share figure for RV components, and we could not find a credible independent estimate. We are not going to make one up.

What we can tell you is that RV manufacturers have been saying for years that they have very few places to buy some of these components. Combining the two largest suppliers does not increase that number.

The companies say the merger will help manufacturers address affordability for buyers. That is the claim they are making publicly, and we will hold them to it.

Here is what it means at your campsite.

When a slide motor fails in year four, or an awning arm bends, or a leveling jack quits, you are buying a replacement part from this company or waiting on one. The question that matters to you is not the stock price. It is whether that part costs more next year and whether you have anywhere else to buy it.

So do two things.

First, write down the actual manufacturer and part number of the major components in your rig now, while everything works. Having that number turns a two-week dealer order into a phone call.

And second, when something breaks, price the aftermarket before you accept the dealer quote. Independent RV parts suppliers still exist. Use them while they do.

Shareholders still have to approve this deal, and regulators still have to clear it. We will be following both.

STORY 5: THE RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD IS LIVING IN A TRAILER

We end this week in Memphis, Tennessee, in an Airstream.

Elon Musk, who by Bloomberg's count is worth somewhere north of $900 billion, told the All-In podcast this past week that he is living in an Airstream travel trailer parked near xAI's Colossus supercomputer site in Memphis.

He called it his palace.

Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, backed him up. Her description: "He sleeps on the factory floor. He's in Memphis, helping build buildings."

This is apparently a habit. He slept in his first office at Zip2. He slept under a desk at X.com. He slept on the Tesla factory floor during the Model 3 production crunch, and on a couch at Twitter headquarters after he bought it.

But this time he did not sleep under a desk. He bought a trailer.

And everybody covering this story seems to think the remarkable part is that a man with that kind of money would live in something small.

RVers know better.

There is nothing hard about living in an Airstream. People do it for months at a time, in every state, on purpose, and a good many of them tell us it was the best decision they ever made.

You get a bed, a kitchen, a bathroom, a door you can lock and a window with a view that changes whenever you feel like changing it. That is not roughing it. That is the whole idea.

So we will take it as a compliment.

The wealthiest person on the planet had every option available to him, including a hotel, a mansion or a jet with a bedroom in it.

He picked the same aluminum trailer that is sitting in campgrounds from Maine to Oregon this morning.

We have been telling you for years that this is a pretty good way to live.

Turns out we are not the only ones who figured it out.

CLOSE

That is our RV news for this week.

Thank you for being with us this week. We appreciate you more than you know.

If you have a comment or a question, you can reach us through the Contact link at RVPodcast.com.

We will be back with another episode Wednesday, when Jennifer joins me for our Stories from the Road edition, with interviews, RV lifestyle tips, travel ideas and your questions.

And if you have not already done so, please sign up for our free RV Lifestyle newsletter.

We publish it every day with RV news, travel ideas, campground information, helpful tips and reports from the road.

You can sign up for free at RVLifestyle.com/Newsletter.

If you enjoy this podcast, would you please leave us a rating and a review?

It only takes a moment, but it helps other RVers discover the program. We read those reviews, and we sincerely appreciate every one of them.

And one last reminder. Our End-of-Season RV Shutdown Workshop is live on Thursday, Oct. 8. If you want to avoid a split water line and a ruined spring, come spend the time with me. Sign up at Community.RVLifestyle.com/landing/workshop.

I am Mike Wendland.

Thanks for listening, and Happy Trails!

SOURCES

Story 1: Hershey show attendance and the state of the RV market

RVBusiness, first-day attendance at America's Largest RV Show:

https://rvbusiness.com/first-day-attendance-at-hershey-show-is-highest-since-2021/

RVBusiness, show opens amid soft market:

https://rvbusiness.com/americas-largest-rv-show-opens-this-week-amid-soft-market/

America's Largest RV Show, official show information:

https://www.largestrvshow.com/

RV Industry Association, RV RoadSigns quarterly forecast:

https://www.rvia.org/rv-roadsigns-quarterly-forecast

RV News, 2026 RVIA monthly wholesale shipment reports:

https://www.rvnews.com/2026-rvia-wholesale-shipment-reports-2/

Story 2: Elkhart Open House and Alliance RV opening to the public

RVBusiness, Alliance RV opens doors to the public:

https://rvbusiness.com/alliance-rv-opens-doors-to-the-public-for-26-open-house/

RV News, Alliance RV opens Elkhart Extravaganza display to public:

https://www.rvnews.com/alliance-rv-opens-elkhart-extravaganza-display-to-public/

RVBusiness, 2026 Elkhart RV Open House dates:

https://rvbusiness.com/2026-elkhart-rv-open-house-is-set-for-week-of-sept-28/

Story 3: Data centers proposed on BLM public land

The Washington Sun, data center proposals on public lands:

https://www.washingtonsun.com/climate-environment/trump-administration-data-centers-public-lands-proposals

Salt Lake Tribune, BLM tasked with finding public land for AI data centers:

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/09/13/trump-admin-tasks-blm-find-public/

Bureau of Land Management, what we manage:

https://www.blm.gov/about/what-we-manage

Story 4: Lippert and Patrick merger antitrust filing delay

RV News, Patrick Industries and Lippert delay merger process:

https://www.rvnews.com/patrick-industries-and-lippert-delay-merger-process/

LCI Industries investor release, terms of the all-stock merger:

https://investors.lci1.com/news/news-details/2026/Patrick-Industries-and-LCI-Industries-to-Combine-in-All-Stock-Merger-Creating-a-Premier-Platform-Serving-Global-Outdoor-Enthusiast-Housing-and-Other-Markets/default.aspx

Patrick Industries investor release, merger announcement:

https://ir.patrickind.com/investor-news-events/press-releases/detail/310/patrick-industries-and-lci-industries-to-combine-in-all-stock-merger-creating-a-premier-platform-serving-global-outdoor-enthusiast-housing-and-other-markets

RVBusiness, why the Patrick and Lippert merger matters to the RV industry:

https://rvbusiness.com/potential-patrick-lippert-merger-is-huge-news-for-rv-industry/

Story 5: Elon Musk living in an Airstream in Memphis

RVBusiness, Musk says he is living in an Airstream trailer in Memphis:

https://rvbusiness.com/elon-musk-says-hes-living-in-an-airstream-trailer-in-memphis/

Fortune, Musk living in an Airstream to oversee xAI expansion:

https://fortune.com/2026/09/15/elon-musk-airstream-trailer-memphis-xai-colossus-data-center-sleeping-factory-floor-twitter-tesla-production-hell/