US Southwest Southern Arizona Overlanders Recurring Monthly Meetup

[brien]

Tomorrow night is the August meetup! Come hungry! Button Brew House will be selling pizza by the slice again, and the Fork n Fire food truck will be on-site with delicious BBQ Fork n Fire | Fork and Fire Mobile Foods, LLC | United States

 

[brien]

October's Southern Arizona Overlanders Meetup is THIS THURSDAY EVENING! I'm gonna try something a little different this time. Instead of just a purely social meetup as in the past, I'm going to put on a little crash course on navigation and orienteering with paper maps and a compass! This will be an interactive activity for anybody who wants to participate, I'll have about a dozen or so extra map compasses, but please feel free to bring your own if you have one.

 

[Ignoreamos]

Hey Y'all! Michael Lansky here.. Tucson guy.. not new to offroading (done a lot of off road racing of dirt bikes and UTV's) but kinda new to the Overlanding side of off roading.. will try and make a Meet up... bought a 02 Mitsubishi Montero that im turning into a Overlander.. lot to learn about vehicle set up etc.. looking forward to meeting others who share the love of adventure and the outdoors! oh.... can you post the location and time again of the next meet up?

 

[brien]

Hey Y'all! Michael Lansky here.. Tucson guy.. can you post the location and time again of the next meet up?

Hi! We meet EVERY 3RD THURSDAY (Next one is this Thursday, Oct. 17!) at the Button Brew House (6800 N Camino Martin, Tucson, AZ) from 6-8-ish PM. The brew house schedules a food truck for us as well, so come hungry.

 

[Ignoreamos]

Hi! We meet EVERY 3RD THURSDAY (Next one is this Thursday, Oct. 17!) at the Button Brew House (6800 N Camino Martin, Tucson, AZ) from 6-8-ish PM. The brew house schedules a food truck for us as well, so come hungry.

I will see if I can make it,,, I live about as far away from there as you can and still be in Tucson! hope to see you then!

 

[VanillaSpice]

Thanks for a fun evening, and I learned something new about navigation!

 

[Slackeraz]

Hi Brien,
Hope to make it tomorrow. Looking forward to it.
Thanks,
Mat

 

[brien]

Hi Brien,
Hope to make it tomorrow. Looking forward to it.
Thanks,
Mat

Excellent, see you tonight!

 

[lenf2]

I see that the last post here was in Feb. Are you still having the meets or has the virus stopped it all? If so, are there any plans on starting again?

 

[stokescr]

Join us EVERY 3RD THURSDAY at the Button Brew House (6800 N Camino Martin, Tucson, AZ) to talk about adventuring over some delicious Tucson craft beer. The meetup is a general social event to talk about overlanding and maybe even plan some trips. Some months there may be a topic or speaker. Please note that the venue is BYOF - Bring Your Own Food. If you plan on eating, you are allowed to bring any food you like into the establishment. Often there is a food truck or cart parked outside serving food as well. The brewhouse does also have some pre-packaged snacks for sale, like nuts, jerky, sweets, etc.

I

 

[stokescr]

Is this meetup still active? Also is there any multiday camping events ever held by OB in the Tucson area. Have never seen one posted. I would really be interested in an OB event if one was ever posted.

 

[brien]

The in-person meetup is on-hold at the moment due to the pandemic, but I will be organizing a Zoom meetup for this month. Some of us are getting together in small groups for trips at the moment (just did a multi-day in the Chiricahua Mountains this past holiday weekend) but there are no large organized events on the horizon for the time being. This is maybe a good topic for discussion on the Zoom! I'll post an update in this thread when i have the meeting invite all set up. We'll do it on the same date and time as usual - Third Thursday, 6pm

 

[stokescr]

The in-person meetup is on-hold at the moment due to the pandemic, but I will be organizing a Zoom meetup for this month. Some of us are getting together in small groups for trips at the moment (just did a multi-day in the Chiricahua Mountains this past holiday weekend) but there are no large organized events on the horizon for the time being. This is maybe a good topic for discussion on the Zoom! I'll post an update in this thread when i have the meeting invite all set up. We'll do it on the same date and time as usual - Third Thursday, 6pm

 

[stokescr]

Thanz, Brien!

 

[Graeman]

If we can go to restaurants and riots (politically correct term - protests) then we should be able to go and hang out together. It isn't stopping people from getting together for camping trips so why are you letting this stop you from hanging out at your brewery? Is there ever going to be a meet up at another location that is best for everyone or just the people on the west side of town? Simple rules - if you are sick stay home, if you are healthy and want to meet others then go. Just my $0.02

 

[lenf2]

If we can go to restaurants and riots (politically correct term - protests) then we should be able to go and hang out together. It isn't stopping people from getting together for camping trips so why are you letting this stop you from hanging out at your brewery? Is there ever going to be a meet up at another location that is best for everyone or just the people on the west side of town? Simple rules - if you are sick stay home, if you are healthy and want to meet others then go. Just my $0.02

I have to agree with you, but we can thank our "do-nothing but make it look like you really are" politicians for all this. And you are right, events that they agree with or go to are OK, but ones the common people might go to are not.

 

[brien]

If we can go to restaurants and riots (politically correct term - protests) then we should be able to go and hang out together. It isn't stopping people from getting together for camping trips so why are you letting this stop you from hanging out at your brewery? Is there ever going to be a meet up at another location that is best for everyone or just the people on the west side of town? Simple rules - if you are sick stay home, if you are healthy and want to meet others then go. Just my $0.02

I have a different perspective since my father is the director of wound care at TMC, my mom is a retired RN, and my sister is a paramedic firefighter. Both my sister and father are on the front lines of this and it would be irresponsible of me to encourage a non-critical in-person social event that can easily wait until this is over. They have each already had numerous exposures, so it's already a stressful situation. I have been quarantined and have been going on local adventures with a very small and close group of trusted friends who have also been quarantining, even with that, we continue to social distance while we are together, as the virus also spreads from pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people infected with COVID-19 (based on medical studies and scientific data, not politics). Unfortunately this makes the "rules" anything but simple, because by the time people feel sick, they have been transmitting the disease for at least a few days.

Our local meetup location is also a brewery, which have all been mandated to shut down again as of last week. Seeing as our state is currently one of the major hot spots for the pandemic, it would be irresponsible of me to organize or attend any in-person social event for the time being.

having said all that jibber jabber, let's definitely all get together virtually this month via Zoom. we can reminisce about the days or yore and share tips with each other on responsible adventuring in this new age we're currently in. Maybe we can all do a show-and-tell or something, too. There's been a few other OB meetups doing virtual Zoom events and i've heard they are going well.

 

[brien]

Is there ever going to be a meet up at another location that is best for everyone or just the people on the west side of town?

I forgot to address this part. YES! some background: When I initially started this meetup, the location on the far northwest side was chosen because we had people attending from Phoenix, I figured the northwest side would be sort of a compromise, yes, us Tucsonans would have to drive a bit farther, but the Phoenicians would get to drive a bit less.

Now that we have /also/ started up a Phoenix meetup, there's really no point in us continuing on the Northwest side. I am looking at locations that are more central and will likely have that selected by the time we are able to start in-person meetups again. I have a few goals in mind with selecting a location - Ideal locations would:

1) Be a Tucson-owned business
2) Have an overlapping interest in what we are about
3) Family friendly
4) Food options
5) Have large enough indoor and outdoor space (we've already outgrown the indoor space of Button for most of our meetups)
6) Have a decent sized parking area in the case that we want to do rig walk arounds or a "car show"

Having said that, Button Brew House has been awesome to us, and they have done a TON of stuff to bend over backwards for our group, including coordinating with the food trucks and even purchasing additional outdoor heating for us when the temps were bitter cold. I just wanted to acknowledge how awesome they treat us, despite the location being a relative pain in the butt (and really noisy when a train goes by)

I'm open to suggestions! A reminder, our monthly meetup is a social meetup (sometimes with light training talks), it is scheduled on a weekday evening on purpose to leave our weekends open. Once things settle down I will be planning some more group trips. Just before the pandemic we had our first group trip - a taco cook off - and it was a lot of fun!

I also have a fun event in the works that will happen pandemic or not. It will be a socially-distanced competition and camp, but I have to wait until after the monsoon season or else the location will not be safe. More details on that in the future, maybe even on this month's Zoom meetup.

 

[lenf2]

Have you considered a location in Vail? It is close to Tucson and equally to more southern places like Bisbee, Benson, Wilcox and Sierra Vista, as well as being close to the freeway. There are a lot of businesses there with a lot of room that would likely love the business. Additionally there are a lot of trails and off road areas to explore for a "mini-ride."

 

[Wdrell]

Brian I hope the group picks backup again, I know you sent out a msg on meetup saying the meeting were canceled until further notice. Hope this isnt the end of it.