Working the Central Florida Fair in Orlando

Work a little…play a lot! We will be doing this for most of this year but just for less than a month left in Florida.



This was a new account for Scootaround this year and our first Fair with them. We have worked Car Shows, Quilt Shows, Antique Shows and an Air Show, but up until now we had not worked any Fairs. It is a bit different. We are camping right on site, with only electric and water. There is a dump station that we are able to use, but what a pain that is. They also offered a dumping service for a fee which we took advantage of, so we did not have to move our home.


The food booths were abundant. We tried so many different types of food. We always prepare for these shows to eat at home, much less expensive. However, after smelling this delicious aroma day after day, hour after hour, we weakened and just had to sample some of the local cuisine. That we did, as you can see with the photos we tried many things we never tasted before, and there were plenty of others items we ate that we did not take photos.






The Central Florida Fair is located right on a lake, which is a beautiful setting.


It is open for 11 days and the hours are only long on the weekends, otherwise during the week they are only open in the evenings. We not only rent scooters, but we also provided wheelchairs, strollers and wagons, the latter is what we rented most.


We knew from opening day that this was going to be rough, we just really didn’t realize how rough it would be. We were warned from day one about being in “Gangland”, as other vendors called it. The first night really opened our eyes to things I haven’t seen in a very long time. I worked hard all of my life to keep us out of this type of environment, but life has brought me right back to it and I have to admit, it is not a good feeling. It began on the first night with fights, then escalated to a shooting and cop attack, depending on who you speak with is what story you get. One of our customers said he heard a gunshot, then we heard from the news there was only an attack on a police officer. We heard about an assault to one of the vendor’s daughter in the restroom. We witnessed a shoving match between two vendors. Several vendors pulled out after the first weekend. We thought about it and discussed it several times but chose to stay.

We are told that the other fairs we are going to be working are nothing like this, we are very happy to hear that since this will be the last time we work this particular fair. There was never a time we were actually in the line of fire, but we were not comfortable which led to us shortening our hours of operation but we hung in there until the end of our contract.