CHEAP Florida Keys RV Resort | Fiesta Key Rv Resort

hello everyone and welcome to today's video we just got done spending three weeks in the florida keys two of that which was at fiesta key rv resort and that's what we're gonna talk about today [Music] so yes the thumbnail is correct we did spend twenty dollars per night for two weeks staying here and that is through the thousand trails membership and encore uh add-on that we have we're gonna talk a little bit more about that at the end but first we want to actually review and talk about the resort itself let's start with our expectation of the park because at the time we were leaving the koa sugar loaf which was brand new yeah it was pretty swanky it was very well groomed so we were like oh well we're going to fiesta key now which we knew it wouldn't have the brand new landscaping and all of the brand new stuff going into it it's a little bit older i think it's an older park yeah it's a lot older park obviously the koat just got redone i don't know which one started first but yes i did read a lot of the reviews and there were a lot of kind of negative reviews and people saying some some kind of bad and harsh things about it and the pictures don't quite look as good because of the lack of landscaping so yeah going into it we were not quite sure what to expect but then once we showed up we actually fell in love with it really quickly it grew on us really quickly and yeah it was a totally different experience and you could feel that right away yeah and that's starting out with us getting a very lucky spot that was right behind the rainbow row cottages on the waterfront and our site was looking directly at the ocean we got lucky once again and it really made a big difference for where we were because we had that water view spot so it made everything better from the morning walks from our view out of our rv to our workouts like it was so exciting to get up and go outside and go work out with an ocean view yeah and taking louie out for a short pee break or potty break is nice because you're literally just a couple steps away from the ocean and it was just beautiful uh kind of views everywhere so back to the entrance again and the whole vibe we arrived on a saturday and it was banging people were definitely there for the weekend they were partying music was loud and a lot of energy a lot of people from northern parts of florida or central parts of florida or southern florida that would come down and just come for the weekend and it had a good vibe to it then monday came and it was definitely much more mellow it is the up north cabins yeah for the people in south florida we're from minnesota and everybody goes up north to their cabins well it seems like in south south florida everybody goes down south to the keys where they maybe have a boat uh because they had a huge marina here but yeah it was definitely a weekend type of crowd and we're in the off season as well so i think a lot of local residents maybe come down there for the for the better rates in the off season and then it seems like security kind of cracked down a little bit on the second weekend which we do have to mention they have quite a bit of rules there they have like a laundry list of rules and we actually broke one of them yeah we found out on i think day two or three um that we are not allowed to have a puppy pen outside so louie our puppy is about five months old at the time and we're still using puppy pens uh on the outside for him to sit outside for a little bit of time because he really does enjoy it being out of the rv and just sitting and watching the people and the birds and the trees and the smells he just loves it out there so we were told right away that there is no uh pens allowed which was pretty alarming to us because of the i don't know hundreds of places we've been at i've never seen that rule in place or at least enforced which in some places it needs to be enforced and maybe here in the keys is a good reason because people maybe just leave their dog outside the whole time and then they head off to key west for the whole day and you have a neglect situation so along with this big stack of rules comes a very nice staff they were super friendly super friendly yes and we even had one lovely lady that would see louie and she called him luis and she would go and yell at the top of her lungs louis i love you and she would come over and pet him and play him play with him and it was just uh it was heartwarming it was yeah it was really great several staff members that got used to seeing us at the same places at the same time every day they would chitchat and it was really nice so let's move on speaking of louie into the dog park now this coming from the koa dog park which we thought was very nice and with that astro turf this one was like two three maybe four times the size it was much bigger so this dog park was not only huge but it did have nice um the grass was fake in there too which is really nice because it keeps your dogs a lot cleaner when they're like rolling around and playing and they can't dig at it but what was really nice about this park is it had a really big tree huge huge old tree and a bench right underneath it so no matter what time of the day you could seek plenty of shade and it'd be much more comfortable because it was quite hot there this is something i really liked about the park was when you walk along the perimeter of the park there is tons of ocean view everywhere like water is everywhere around the park versus just having one certain area that you could go out on a pier like water was everywhere and that's part of the experience in the keys is having that big open view of the ocean and you certainly got that at this location yeah this particular key fiesta key has ocean like she said on multiple sites and the marina is huge on multiple sites so sides so it had multiple points to watch sunrise and sunset and it was very open and you could see the sun directly drop into the ocean sunsets there were amazing as well as the sun rises it was just a very beautiful spot to uh to pick up all of that nature yeah and the sun sets were fun because they actually have a restaurant on site and it was like right on the beach that they had tables so you could grab a little cocktail and sit and watch the sunset right from the comfort of the chair and it was just a really great spot to relax every night yeah the restaurant the beach the pool and the hot tub was all in the same area so it was really nice uh combined proximity to each other yeah but really just that same great view of the ocean and the big tall palm trees it was uh it was an unexpected really nice area i loved being able to go to the beach for like an hour at lunch and just sit there and relax maybe take a dip in the hot tub and just you know have the whole place to yourself basically the marinas were also very very close by so like the park was big but not small and small but not big like it was just a good kind of medium-sized park um and i'd love to be able to walk along the docks and the edge and just look at all the wildlife sea life that is there was a lot of sea life lots of of things to look at i saw this really cool uh green eel which was along the rocks on the point out there and i've never seen an eel like this in the ocean it was big it was green and it was pretty scary looking and that was not too far away from the swimming spot which is where we took a few dips in the water and i could only imagine what was below by our toes as we were swimming in those we saw a lot of fish and we saw a lot of beautiful fish too lots of schools of fish yeah um there was a reported manatee there that we did not see but yeah we missed the man we would have been in the right spot at the right time we would have seen it and supposedly there's a saltwater crocodile 13 feet long yeah aggressive wow kind of scary we did see dolphins that one night we did yeah we saw dolphins yeah just beautiful beautiful marine life and what i really liked about the pool is that there was plenty of seating and that's something that's really nice where you don't have to like time it or like grab a chair and reserve it and hoard it like there is plenty of chairs for people a lounge and you know we are in off season so i don't know what that looks like yeah during christmas time all of this was older than the koa as far as like the build of it but it was done really nice and this park is going through some upgrades i think and eventually it's going to be really really nice so that pool is a raised deck and so not from the water but if you're standing outside of the pool you're just looking at the ocean which is amazing uh and then the hot tub below it is on the beach and that right from sitting in the hot tub you're looking at the water pretty cool so if you caught our video last week on the koa you know we really raved about how nice the sites were they had a lot of different style of sites they were all brand new good landscaping in between very beautiful and i'd say one big difference here at fiesta key is the majority of the sites are not nice there's not that much landscaping in between it and it's basically like a giant gravel yeah parking lot especially if you're in the middle of it so they do have a bunch of ocean water sites that are very very close to each other and you know actually something that we wouldn't have really wanted to stay in you're just you're so close to your neighbor it's just it just didn't seem like it would be that fun just to get on the water as compared to our site which was looking at the water we could see the ocean very clearly out of five of our windows in the rv and it was pretty amazing to be that close but the majority of the sites here um are nothing to write home about it's more of the park itself and the location of the park yeah being the florida keys yeah and the location was pretty good you're kind of sandwiched in between isla murada and marathon which are two very popular places we really liked isla murada really liked it yeah we spent a few days going there separate and like checking it out going out to eat going and having fun and there's so much to to do there yeah we had probably our best dining experience in the keys which was at maratha bay yeah and this was this beautiful restaurant right on the water and the food was really really good what was the origins of it was it it was some sort of caribbean theater yeah keys slash caribbean fusion-ish you had some uh fish that was really really good it did i had the catch of the day and it was the freshest seafood that we'd had at a restaurant was that the wahoo yeah that was the big wahoo fish you've never had that before never had before very meaty it was really good also nearby we went to mr lobster that is not a restaurant but a seafood market where you can go and get fresh seafood local so that was fun um again yeah you ended up getting a few fillets i did yeah i got mahi mahi and some sea scallops oh those scallops are really good we have those with steak those are good yeah they remember yeah i do they were really good making my mouth water it seemed pretty fresh and local if anybody knows more about mr lobster let us know i think it's pretty fresh and local it seemed like it was right on the docks and what was nice is it was literally a six minute drive from fiesta key right up the road so i think normally when it is lobster season when it is shrimp season it's probably pretty fun to go and see all the lobsters and pick something up fresh oh speaking of lobsters i saw multiple beautiful lobsters in the marina at fiesta key you know a couple hundred feet from our site and i don't know if you need license to to pull those out but the first thought in my mind was why don't i just jump in there and yank those two out and have a nice surprise for christine for dinner i didn't though so we are not sure if it's the location or if it was the higher wind that we had at fiesta key but just one week earlier at the koa at sugarloaf key the no siems were horrendous they were vicious blood sucking little monsters that were after you during like the morning and the night they were really bad so it was hard to do those sunrise and sunset walks that we now got to enjoy at fiesta key because there was basically no zero bugs it was amazing yeah for the whole two weeks it was great and i think that really did add on to the experience because it was just so fun and free to just walk along the ocean and you know take our dog for walks or to sit up could you imagine sitting at the beach and having no seams just attack you yeah it was horrible that would have been really bad so the other encore park in the florida keys is called sunshine key and we did spend four nights there back in 2019 in our van and it was such a long time ago and such a blur we'd only been on the road for four months at the time and i barely remember it was a world when we spent one of those days going down to key west the other ones i think we were just relaxing and enjoying the area but if uh i had to say we probably like fiesta key over sunshine key but we're gonna have to go back to sunshine key and uh assess that for ourselves and we did ask that was kind of like one of the hot trending questions that guests would ask each other like which park do you like better because once you're at a thousand trails park you know you quickly find out that most people staying there are members as well not always but so then you start shattering well did you stay at this park have you stayed at that park and when you were discussing fiesta key versus sunshine key most everybody said that they like fiesta key better with the exception of the location it's not quite as good as sunshine yeah sunshine was a little bit closer to key west like 45 minutes from key west where fiesta keys i don't know an hour something so a little bit farther away so there's that and speaking of thousand trails we'll finish up this video talking a little bit about it we don't really review thousand trails parks that much we don't talk about it that much but we have been members for almost four years now yeah since 2018. yeah we actually got our first zone pass in 2018 when we were in minnesota and we bought our van in florida so we flew down one-way tickets to florida picked up our van and we ended up spending uh one night at a harvest host and one night at a thousand trails nachos trace yep which was not very nice if i recall so the first year 2019 when we hit the road we basically bought zone passes as we traveled around the entire country we felt and still feel that thousand trails is such a good value for full-time rving and such an inexpensive upfront cost that we decided to purchase a full used platinum membership at the end of 2019 which is what we've been using for the past few years now and this used platinum membership was around 2700 i want to say which allows us to do full 21 days in uh park to park to park 21 days uh up to three weeks so it's it's a full membership if we wanted to we could basically live in thousand trails full-time which we do not which we do not yeah and we do use it a lot more on the east coast where you can't go use free public lands and so it is nice to have both because if we were just on the west coast all the time we would certainly still use it now and then but not anywhere to the extent that we use it on the east coast when we really are using it back to back yeah when we're on the west coast we're probably you know 60 plus percent boondocking and 40-ish percent in the rv parks maybe which is usually just around the holidays or to give us some break from traveling so quickly but now that we're on the east coast big difference we use thousand trails quite a bit as well as national parks state parks uh and various other private campgrounds so to get these keys parks for twenty dollars per night you do need the trails collection add-on which is about 315 dollars per year which you can add on to a zone pass and your zone pass is about 600 a year i think and that zone pass only allows you to stay in the parks within that zone as opposed to a nationwide membership which allows you to stay in all of the zones did you get all that so this is why we i think we don't talk about thousand trails much because it's just so confusing and if you're really interested there's a ton of great videos out there like jason and ray from the getaway couple i always did a bunch of really good ones that explain it very well so we just don't feel the need to go all over that again yeah okay so i think that's it for fiesta key and the keys for us until next time so we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Irene Iron Travels

Views: 25,938

Keywords: Florida keys rv resorts, Florida keys rv parks, Florida keys rv, Florida keys rv camping, fiesta key rv resort, fiesta key rv resort & marina, rv living, rv life, rv

Id: ULvuQ32eGT4

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2022