This time of year, the town of Quartzsite, AZ spans the chasm between unexceptional and categorically unique. To call it a stark set of contrasts would in itself be a severely lacking description.

It’s an RV show (yawn). The largest in the world, with an estimated attendance over 100,000. It’s an outdoor gem, rock, and mineral show (wake me up please) – that lasts almost two months and spreads out over nearly a square mile. It’s a big flea market/bazar (ho hum) that happens to sell bison and longhorn skulls, wolf pelts, 35 foot flag poles, hand-made furniture, tools and supplies, cut-and-polished geodes the size of Bigfoot, and, uh, RV stuff too. It’s a huge open-desert camping area (yeah, nice) – – that fills up with 50,000 RV’s for 10 miles around, dotting the landscape with scatterings of white fiberglass as far as the eye can see. And underneath it all is a little sun-bleached desert town, descended from a 150-year-old fort, that shelters no more than 3,000 souls for most of the year.

As people who routinely seek out wide open spaces, away from crowds and tumult, we always find ourselves somewhat amused at our eagerness to visit Quartzsite each year. But the diversity, the vastness of the desert (even when immersed in RV-clad visitors), and the camaraderie of like-minded travelers, all makes us come back again.

For non-RV folks, this might be a boring set of comments, but I’ll try to give you the gist of the place.

We set up camp at the outskirts of Dome Rock camp, a BLM area out west of town. We arrived just before opening day, and the place was pretty populated – – so we set out a couple of cones to reserve space for our in-laws, arriving the next day. My little red-white-blue streamer is up on a 20-foot fiberglass pole, maybe it will help them find the camp?

Saturday morning, we drove the two miles into town and walked into the big tent. And it is big – – 69,000 square feet under one gigantic roof. That is roughly 1.5 acres of floor space, and that’s just the inside stuff.

So what is sold here at the biggest RV show? Well yes, some RV stuff for sure, but also a potpourri of flea-market stuff like Cutco knives, pain-relief devices and balms, wallets, belts, you know, the usual stuff – – – like Australian marsupial flying squirrels for example.

Outside the tent, one of my guilty pleasures – – smoked barbequed turkey leg. Beyond yummy.

After lunch we hooked up with the Hendersons to say hi, and plan the next mods to Howie (they have a show booth each year). Later, back at camp, a couple of powered parachute riders came by late in the afternoon – – –

– – – and buzzed happily away into the sunset.

Our relatives showed up, had no problem spotting Howie, and were parked when we got back to camp. We made a little campfire and did some catching up. After dark, we watched “floating lanterns” ascend into the night sky, drifting past Orion and off into the black horizon.

At Quartzsite, it’s all part of the big bundle of entertainment that goes on each January.