The First RV Boondocking Team Member

And so my career in the RV Quest for Community Caravan is over. I left for another campsite in the same area this morning.

It was a noble experiment and, I think, a successful one. By "success" I mean that it involved non-trivial interaction between members, resulting in certain changes in their behavior or daily lifestyle.

Two raptors chase a raven around a thermal uplift.

Whatever else, we avoided the standard malaise of intentional/planned Utopias: repression and stasis. Recall your Toynbee (*):

For these works [planned Utopias] are always programmes of action masquerading in the disguise of imaginary descriptive sociology.

Hence in almost all Utopias...an invincibly stable equilibrium is the aim to which all other social ends are subordinated and, if need be, sacrificed.

The experience also required me to scrutinize my behavior around other campers, and then try to file off some of my sharp edges.

Or one could look at it as a good little Hegelian. Think of the RV stereotype as the "Thesis"; the Quest for Community Caravan as the "Antithesis"; and now it's time for a "Synthesis." In order to break free of some trap or rut, it helps to think about or experiment with its opposite, even it this "opposite" is no better as a match-up than the initial trap/rut.

The Synthesis I have in mind is more of a "Team" than a Community. I am not comfortable with the "...dawning of the Age of Aquarius" culture of the community. And besides, it's a chick term (grin). An "intentional mobile community" also makes some people uncomfortable because the very word "intent" implies social engineering, and most of us don't want to be socially engineered.
  

I want a "team" of RV boondockers who either exercise or pursue less athletic outdoor sports, without engines. Examples include mountain biking, hiking, photography (but not through the motorhome's windshield), fly fishing, rock collecting, off-leash dog walking, etc. As emphasized a couple posts ago, it would be great to see real, non-trivial, human interaction between team members  -- a band of mere exercise partners would be a huge disappointment.

The amazing news is that the first team member is showing up -- perhaps today! Now, if we can only coax his low-ground-clearance Class C through the lava bumps...

(*) Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History -- abridged volume 1, "The Arrested Civilizations," page 183.