GFC and a Guy Named Sam
The friendliest person we met in 6 months on the road
Ever meet people who just leave an impression? Could be a good one, could be a bad one, but the type of people that you leave the interaction and then they pop into mind a day later, a week later - maybe even a year later? One of those people we met on our trip was a guy named Sam.
We met him at a GoFastCamper meetup. Now, a little backstory is probably necessary if you happen to not spend as much time on a particular corner of the internet as we do. GoFastCamper is a brand of truck camper and rooftop tent that we have been obsessed with for a couple of years. They make lightweight pick up truck campers that look like this:
And they make awesome rooftop tents for SUVs like ours that look like this:
They have a reputation for being incredibly lightweight, durable, and as their name implies: fast. As in they don’t add too much to the vehicle you drive them on. They are also just fantastic marketers, because I have no idea if all of that stuff is true or not, but I definitely believe it. They do a great job of putting their product out there as something that will instantly take your weekend camping trip from spending some time outside to an epic adventure. For them, the camper is all about getting you to awesome places so that you can do awesome things. Pull up to a spot, get set up in no time, and then take off on your mountain bikes. Or pop open the camper, let down the tailgate, and all of a sudden you’ve got an outdoor bar wherever you go. They are one of those companies that is so annoyingly good at marketing because they don’t sell you on the product - they sell you on a lifestyle. And to add to all of it, they make their products in Bozeman, MT. They have had me hook, line, and sinker for a few years now. Just look through their Instagram for a bit and they’ll get you too.
The pickup truck camper would have been the perfect solution for our trip, but it was unfortunately just outside of the price range. Right around the Canadian border we started to feel the coziness of living inside an SUV and imagined how nice it would be to have one of these GFCs (as the cool kids call it). In fact, we started scheming up ways that maybe we could somehow get the rooftop tent to put on top of our car in the middle of the trip. When GFC announced they were doing a giveaway shortly after we started our most serious day dreaming about it, we thought maybe it was fate. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. All of that to say, it feels like we’ve had a longstanding relationship with GFC, even though the extent of it was reading articles about it and following them on Instagram.
Which is all a long backstory to explain why, when GFC announced that they were doing a big camping meetup near Joshua Tree, right when we were going to be in the area, we decided to go. They gathered at some random bar in a place called Pioneertown, which essentially looked like the set of an old Western movie. We anxiously milled about, trying to decide why we thought it was a good idea to show up to this thing that we have absolutely no real reason to show up to. We didn’t have a GFC, we know absolutely nobody there, and as social as JoBeth and I can be - its still intimidating to be in a crowd of unknown people. We walked around looking at all of the awesome vehicles, campers, and tents. We got a drink and Raleigh enjoyed lots of free pets. Then it was time to go to camp. They were going to do a giant caravan to the spot about 20 minutes away.
We were still trying to wrap our minds around what we were doing, and hadn’t fully committed to camping out that night, so we purposefully skipped the caravan and made our own little detour to go for a run in Joshua Tree. Hours later, once it was dark, we decided we’d get up the nerve to go to the campout. After all, we had to sleep somewhere! At least this way we’d know we were in a safe spot to camp. So we put the coordinates they had posted to their social media into our GPS, made our way down a bumpy dirt road and just as we were starting to wonder if we were in the right place, spotted about 100 vehicles with canvas mansions hovering over them - like giant orange lanterns telling us yes, this was the right place.
This picture on their website is actually from that night:
As you can imagine, walking up to a giant fire with a big crowd of people that we do not know and have no context for - not even the shared bond of a GFC - was an intimidating prospect. Once we had parked on the far outskirts of the circle in an inconspicuous spot where we thought nobody would notice we were the newbs still sleeping inside their car and not on top of it, we considered just calling it an early night and crashing in the back. But eventually, we worked up the nerve to meander over to the campfire, like nervous kids in the cafeteria looking for a place to sit.
We lingered on the outskirts of the fire, once again Raleigh much quicker at making friends. We had some small talk with a little group of friends who had come together. They shared a drink with us which was very kind. But as we were getting ready to head back to our car, we met one more new friend. Sam. I’m actually not sure exactly how the conversation started, but I’m pretty sure petting Raleigh had something to do with it.
I’m struggling with how to best describe the interaction, but I guess I would best summarize it in this way: he may have been the nicest person we met on our entire trip. Just incredibly friendly and easy to talk to. We chatted with him for probably just 20 minutes or so, but I remember JoBeth and I both walking away from it with our spirits feeling lifted and almost surprised at the joy that this stranger had brought us. I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly it was that made this interaction stand out so much. I’ve got at least a couple of ideas:
He was interested. I think most people spend their time in conversations trying to prove that they are interesting. I know that I’m guilty of this. And at something like this campout, full of adventurers, it is easy to want to try to prove yourself. The person parked next to us had volunteered the information that he was on a 3 month road trip and how existentially life changing its been and all kinds of things, and everything in me wanted to one up him with our big road trip. Because we want to be interesting, to seem valuable. Sam on the other hand, spent way more time being interested in our lives. “Oh you’re from Tennessee? That’s a long way from here, what are you doing in California? Oh you’re on a road trip, where else have you been? What’s that been like?” He just asked great questions. And honestly, maybe he was just perfectly tapping into the part of us that was just looking for an opportunity to show how interesting we are. Either way, the interest that he took in our conversation certainly stood out.
He was enthusiastic. This isn’t just like an introvert vs extrovert, outgoing vs quiet personality thing. He was enthusiastically engaged in the conversation. He obviously had lots of connections at the meetup, but he wasn’t doing that thing where you’re constantly scanning the horizon for your “real” friends or for the people that are easier/cooler/more fun to talk to. He was enthusiastic about the conversation that he was in, he was enthusiastically in the moment.
He was invitational. I think in a really natural way, he made us feel like we belonged. For the insecure, self-conscious people that we all can be, feeling like you belong somewhere is huge. He just seemed delighted that we were there. I think we were going into the night with a really basic, silly insecurity about going to a GFC meetup without a GFC. Instead of making us feel weird about that, he just thought it was awesome that we were doing this whole trip just sleeping inside our car. It wasn’t a knock against us, it was just a fascinating part of our story.
He was full of joy. He just exuded joy, and it was contagious.
He gassed us up. Okay this one is a little silly but let’s be honest, we all love a good compliment. He just thought what we were doing was incredible, and was so excited to talk about it and say that he thought it was awesome. He thought it was absolutely incredible that JoBeth was willing to spend so much time living outside, going to the bathroom in the woods, and going days without showers. He was quick to tell me how lucky I was to have a wife like that (and for a split second I wondered if I should feel threatened by this strong, outgoing attractive man talking about how great my wife was but instead I just let it feed my ego that he thought she was awesome too). He had us feeling great about ourselves by the end of the conversation.
Ultimately, I think he reminded me of Tim Keller’s The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness. In it, he says that if we walked away from meeting a truly humble person, we wouldn’t walk away thinking about how humble they are. Instead, he says the thing we would remember about that person is that they were totally interested in us. They wouldn’t be connecting everything back to themselves, and telling us about how great, or how small they think themselves to be. They simply wouldn’t be thinking of themselves, and would be thinking of the other instead. And when you encounter that kind of person, it is powerful!
So, here’s to random campouts for brands that we love but have nothing to do with it, and kind, self-forgetful strangers like Sam.
**Fun fact #1: he did give us a bumper sticker for his company, I think called Dead Man Offroad. We put it on our Thule cargo box, where we were collecting stickers from our trip. Only later did we notice the catch phrase on the sticker: Go unstuck yourself.
**Fun fact #2: We did finally join the GFC family. It wasn’t through a giveaway, and we unfortunately didn’t have it to use for any part of the trip. But their marketing had really sunk its claws in us, especially after such a great encounter at their campout. So we (thanks to the help of some dear friends) managed to score a limited run of their “Superlite” rooftop tent, which was a fraction of the price of the one we had been dreaming about for the trip. Here’s a very unimpressive picture of it on a weekend camping trip - our own little canvas mansion in the sky.
