President’s Corner
Spring 2024
“It’s not just the cars, it’s the people…”
Here it is an early April day in Missoula, yesterday the temperatures got to 69 degrees and today we have light rain and the low 50s.
Definitely time to start thinking about our cars and what we will do with them this coming driving season. I and the other officers are busy trying to make plans for what events we can have that will be attractive to our members. The challenge is having events that are attractive to our very large (geographically) region.
So far most of the events will be around the northwest part of Montana along with a meet and greet for new members and old on the same day in several cities. Currently we have locations confirmed for Missoula and Great Falls and are working on ones in Bozeman and the Kalispel areas. We are hoping to have this in late May. If you are interested in hosting an event like this, please let us know.
Other events currently in the planning stage are a drive to Lochsa Lodge in Idaho from Missoula, a BBQ lunch on Flathead lake, a group dinner held in Lakeside, a lunch at Quinn's Hot Springs, two High Performance Driver Education weekend in Lewistown and a weekends tour around Glacier scheduled for early October (hopefully the weather gods will be kind to us this Fall). If anyone can suggest other events feel free to contact me or any of our officers Big Sky Team.
I strongly encourage everyone to attend one of our monthly cars & coffee, a great way to see some fabulous cars and meet people. Cars & coffee is held in several cities the second Saturday of every month at 9:30am.
In addition, if you have a favorite drive or activity you would like to share, please reach out to someone on the Big Sky Team.
Recently Trent Neumann and I had the privilege of attending the Zone 14 president’s meeting in Calgary. Zone 14 is made up of six regions including our own, three in the US and three in Canada. It was a great meeting which allowed us to meet our neighbor regions and brainstorm on how we can continue to offer activities that our members will enjoy.
A couple of ideas that we came away with were garage tours and award banquets. We will also be exploring if this makes sense for our region. Garage tours are where members volunteer to open their garages (small and big) for tours and discussions on how they organized and used their individual garage.
At the Calgary meeting we also heard about some of the plans for 2025 which is PCA’s 70th anniversary along with Big Sky’s 50th anniversary. We are already planning a weekend based out of Great Falls (where BSK was founded) and will see if we can coordinate this with National’s event. We are of course looking for volunteers to help plan and organize our weekend celebration. Stay tuned for more information on this event.
Contact me or Jeanette Cheney if interested in helping in any way.
Thank you and I hope to be able to meet at a future event or activity.
Michael Handelman, President Big Sky Region
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