Despite the fact that we've enjoyed various Desert Rendezvous events since 2011, this year marked the first time we'd been able to attend the companion Mountain Rendezvous, put on by the excellent team from American Adventurist. As always, the Rendezvous are a wonderful time to make new friends, see some cool rigs, and eat awesome food.
Annika and hew new friend Hanna
Though this event is entirely by and for overlanders, it's not exactly an overlanding event. For a weekend, we take over a big chunk of the Long Beach BSA Council's Camp Tahquitz. There are flush toilets and running water all over. There are also mountains and trees all over. This was by-far Kimberley's favorite Rendezvous, and I want to assume that it was the latter, and not the former, that made the difference.
As we so often do, we arrived relatively late on Friday, after many folks have already arrived and established their areas. We nosed our way in between a couple of other vehicles, and it turned out to be a fantastic location: Smack-dab in the midst of several other families and their kids! I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you're at all nervous about getting your kid(s) out camping, whenever possible arrange for someone else's kids to be there too. The burden is so much lighter when the kids entertain themselves. Fortunately Kimberley had packed plenty of coloring pages and implements, as our camp table became a veritable art zone.
One of the central parts of every Rendezvous is the food, and this time we were thrice-blessed. On Friday evening the gentlemen from Mojoe Griddle put on an impromptu quesadilla bar, which saved me from having to cook dinner. They followed up on Saturday morning with a massive quantity of pancakes and bacon for everyone in attendance! I don't know if anyone was able to count how many dozens of pounds of bacon ended up on the dual Mojoe's that morning.
Finally, there was the Saturday evening potluck. There was a general burn-ban in effect for the area, but we'd been given permission to use charcoal at the central fire ring. Most just placed their ovens there, but I used the opportunity to try out my new tripod system. I've shamelessly stolen a host of ideas from the excellent Roadii Firegrill to create a combination dutch-oven stand/firepot/elevated campfire/grill system. In this case, I'm simply using the tripod-mounted livestock-feed pan to hold the coals and dutch oven. The chain hoist was really nice for being able to raise the oven for moving coals around and to somewhat control the heat. I look forward to testing the cable system to raise and lower the grilling surface as well.
I made a pretty good stab at an accidentally-vegan and gluten-free (but intentionally vegetarian) Quinoa Adobo Chile. It was very well received, but didn't win me the main prize. Full recipe and more shots of my Roadii-ripoff in action over at my food blog.
Photo courtesy of Brent Haywood Photography
As always, there's a huge line of people to enjoy the food. There were many tasty dishes (both for the DO competition and straight pot-luck), and I was thankful for everyone who did me the favor of eating all of my chile, since it made the cleanup very easy!
Photo courtesy of Brent Haywood Photography
After teaching Annika how to work a moving line to help police garbage out of the camp area on Sunday morning, we packed up and headed back down the mountain. The twisty roads and small breakfast had taken their toll on Annika, so we stopped at one of the rare standalone A&W's in Redlands. She declared her burger and float the best part of the weekend. Well, so much for my cooking, eh?
As always, my hat is way, way off for all of the volunteers from American Adventurist. They have gone to huge lengths to help manifest a wonderful community of Adventure-minded folks. Every outing with this crew is a weekend filled with new and old friends.
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