A crew arrived early Monday morning to put up our Rally tent.  We’ll have all our meals and get-togethers here.  I snapped a few pictures as the tent building progressed throughout the morning:

It wasn’t long before our tent was up and ready for the Alpine Coach “Desert Rat Rally XV”!  Official kick-off is tomorrow (Tuesday the 19th).

I moved the Urban Escape Vehicle a little closer to the group as more and more Coaches came in today.  We’re now parked right next to the tent.

Around noon, Stilla and I took the Silverado with the ATV still on the back into town to fuel up.  It was nice to be able to pay under $2 a gallon for the gas… its been awhile since we’ve seen those kind of prices 🙂

After we gassed up the truck and the ATV, we decided to check out the ‘big tent’ at the RV show in downtown Quartzsite.  Touted as the “largest gathering of RVs and RVers on earth” per the event website (←link here).

We fought the heavy traffic and crowds and were able to find a parking spot right near the entrance…

… then we did a quick walk-thru…

… of the big tent.

The big RV show tent seemed to have the same stuff as last year and seemed all-to-familiar.  Lots of vendors selling stuff unrelated to RV’s.  But there’s still a lot to look at and plenty of food stands with various types of cuisine.

I’m sure we’ll come back to the ‘big tent’ again later in the week, there’s always more to see.

We headed back to the Rally site and saw that many, many more Alpines had arrived while we were gone.

We spent the rest of the day meeting and greeting all our Alpine friends as they arrived.  We also took the ATV off the pickup and finished setting up ‘camp’, i.e., putting out the patio mat, chairs, flagpole, and led lights for a little ambience.

Here’s our Monday evening sunset.  Pretty nice eh?

Check back tomorrow for an update on Rally Day 1… let the fun begin 🙂