Although many showed up early at Amanda’s invitation, the meetup officially began on Monday. With some help, I added my brand new tarp to extend the Tarp Mahal and provide more covered hangout space due to rain in the forecast. We also set up Lisa’s Vevor tent, just purchased from the sadly absent Matty Van Halen, for a snack table and the giveaway piles. The heavy rain surprisingly held off until the early afternoon, longer than expected, so people had plenty of time to meet and mingle while the lighter showers came and went. We scattered back to our vans when it got heavy and about half an inch of rain fell, but later we emerged for a surprise campfire when it stopped as the sun went down.
Tuesday remained overcast. After several days of this, I had to run my generator for a few hours to recharge my batteries. Since it stopped raining, Amanda and I asked people to vacate the common area under the tarps we had created so that it could dry out a bit, since it had gotten a bit muddy with all the foot traffic the previous day. A surprise rainstorm passed through during the late afternoon, including a few minutes of small hail pellets! It cleared within about 45 minutes, but not before dumping three-quarters of an inch of rain on us, even more than the previous day! So much for the tarps drying out. After the rain stopped, though, we had an amazing campfire, with music, drumming, and great conversation.
While we had a core group of about 50 people camping on site, a total of about 75 passed through during the two days, with many just stopping in to say hello for an hour or two, including several from my base camp in La Posa South. Except for the campfires, and an hour or two in the morning to sequester myself in my van to do the bare minimum amount of work I had to do to stay on track for the month, I was running around all over the place. As Amanda’s right-hand man in Matty’s absence, I was her go-to person for some of the more technical questions people were asking her. Many people checked out my setup, particularly since it was two of the three anchor points for the Tarp Mahal we’d created.
Amanda has an amazing community of fans and followers. The vast majority of people were in Dodge Grand Caravans, just like hers. It makes sense. When building out your own home on wheels, you want to see what other people have done, and they’ve looked to her for inspiration. Many have duplicated parts of her setup, or even all of it, in their own vans. Many of them even had small dogs, like Amanda’s Wynston. (Lister was great around all of them, with only one or two clawless swats when they got up in his face. The owners told their dogs they had it coming!) Interestingly, Amanda was by far the youngest person there. Most were closer to my age or older, yet still looked to Amanda for her knowledge and experience. So often we hear of older people not taking young people seriously, but the opposite was true here.
As the de facto co-host of the meetup, people seemed to enjoy meeting me, too. Some recognized me from my appearances in Amanda’s videos, particularly her tour of my van and trailer, or from setting up the Tarp Mahal for the meetup. A few recognized me because they already followed me or had read this website. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to being spotted like that, though it’s a bit less shocking in an environment like this that pretty much invites it.
I made a lot of new friends at this meetup and enjoyed hanging out with the few who I already knew. Several of us are talking about going to the 2024 Arizona Ironwood Meetup near Tucson in a couple of weeks. The hosts and I already follow each other on Instagram and YouTube, and Ron Sees America personally invited me. It seems like the core group I camped with at Amanda’s meetup may be putting the band back together at the Ironwood Meetup. It’ll get me out of the insanity of Quartzsite as the RV crowd starts to thin out a bit. It’s also a great excuse to explore a bit more in an area I’ve never camped in, and with friends so I’m not exploring alone.
Anytime I spend time with Amanda, she encourages and inspires me to give my YouTube channel another try. This time it wasn’t just her, as many people I met asked me if I had a channel of my own. I can tell from my YouTube analytics page that I’ve picked up quite a few new subscribers this week, no doubt from the meetup since I haven’t posted anything lately. I should work on fixing that.
Smokey Da Van 