The van gathering calendar has a shape to it: a heavy run through spring and early summer, a late-summer cluster in the mountains, then a long quiet stretch until Florida warms up in February. We are in the late-summer cluster right now.
Here is what is genuinely still on the calendar for 2026, what has already run, and — just as important — which well-known gatherings are currently in limbo. Van events change plans more than most, so a few of these come with caveats you should read before booking anything.
Image courtesy of Adventure Van Expo
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Most van gatherings are a field, a stage, some vendor booths, and whatever you brought to eat. VanWild is a different animal: four nights in Montrose, Colorado where breakfast, dinner, drinks, and a guided adventure every single day are all included in one ticket.
The fifth annual VanWild runs September 17–20, 2026 at The Camper’s Hub, and the format is worth understanding even if you never go — because it points at where van gatherings may be heading.
Images courtesy of Adrenaline HQ / VanWild
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New Zealand’s tiny house scene has a scale problem that works in its favour: it is small enough that most of the country’s builders can fit under one roof, and once a year they do. The Tiny House Expo returns to Mystery Creek in Hamilton from 30 October to 1 November 2026, billed as New Zealand’s largest tiny house village.
What sets this one apart from a typical home show is the framing. The organisers are not selling a dream — they are openly selling clarity, for people who have read every blog and joined every Facebook group and come out more confused than when they started.
Images courtesy of Tiny House Expo NZ, photos by Matt Crawford Photography
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Most of the pods that land in our inbox are built to be looked at. This one is built to be lived in — and it does it inside a footprint smaller than a single parking space. The 4m Micro Home from Australian maker Elsewhere Pods packs a kitchenette, a full wet bathroom with a shower and flushing toilet, and a bed or desk into roughly 4 metres by 2.4 metres (about 13 ft. by 7 ft. 10 in.). That is about 103 square feet of ground area, with something like 92 square feet of usable room once you account for the wall build-up.
What makes it interesting is not the size. It is the delivery model. Elsewhere prefabricates and test-assembles the whole thing in their factory, flat-packs it, ships it to your site, and reassembles it in two to five days. The company quotes about twelve weeks start to finish. For anyone who has watched a conventional build stretch across a year, that number is the headline.
Images courtesy of Elsewhere Pods
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The busiest stretch of the tiny house event calendar is behind us — TinyFest California, the Carolina Tiny House Festival, and the Fresno Tiny House Expo have all wrapped for the year. But there is still a solid run of shows, expos, and hands-on camps between now and the end of 2026, plus three events already locked in for 2027.
Here is everything still on the calendar, in date order, with what we know about each and a direct link to the organiser.
Image courtesy of United Tiny House Association
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Most tiny houses ask a family to compromise somewhere. Usually it is the bathroom, which shrinks to a wet-room the size of a phone booth, or the second sleeping space, which becomes a crawl-in shelf above the couch. The Kookaburra 2.0 from Unplgd Tiny Homes takes the opposite approach: it stretches to 8.5 metres (about 28 feet), splits the upstairs into two separate lofts, and spends its bonus square footage on a bathroom with a full-size freestanding tub.
Unplgd is a custom builder based in Lawson, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and the Kookaburra is their signature loft model. This 2.0 version is the family edition — a half-metre longer than the original, reworked around a dual-loft layout, and priced from AU$195,000 turnkey. The show unit in these photos was touring the Australian tiny house expo circuit with a sale sign in the window.
Images courtesy of Unplgd Tiny Homes
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It is the first question almost every Florida reader asks us, and it is the one with the most bad information floating around it: can you legally live in a tiny house in Florida?
The honest answer is yes, thousands of people already do. But Florida does not have one tiny house law. It has two completely separate legal tracks, and which one you land on is decided by a single thing: whether your tiny house has wheels under it. Get that distinction right and the rest of the process is manageable. Get it wrong and you can spend $80,000 on a beautiful home that your county will not let you sleep in.
This guide walks through both tracks, the specific building code Florida has already adopted for tiny houses, what actually happened to the tiny home and ADU bills in Tallahassee, and the four legal paths people are using right now.
The short answer
Tiny house on a permanent foundation: Legal statewide as a dwelling. Florida has adopted Appendix Q, the tiny house building code. Your real obstacle is local zoning, especially minimum house size and minimum lot size rules.
Tiny house on wheels: Legal to own and park, but Florida classifies it as a recreational vehicle or park trailer, not a dwelling. In most residential zones it cannot be your permanent, full-time residence. It belongs in an RV park, a park model community, or a tiny house community.
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If you are trying to decide between a Sprinter and a Transit, or between paying a builder and doing it yourself, there is no substitute for standing inside forty finished vans in one afternoon and asking their owners what they would change.
That is the entire premise of Adventure Van Expo, a travelling show that has been touring Western fairgrounds and ski resorts for years. Three stops remain on the 2026 schedule, and they are stacked into a five-week window between mid-August and mid-September.
Images courtesy of Adventure Van Expo
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If you have ever priced out a tiny house on wheels and then run headfirst into the question that stops most people cold — where am I actually allowed to put this thing? — there is genuinely good news out of Southern California.
San Diego County has formally recognized tiny homes on wheels as legal dwellings. Not as recreational vehicles. Not as temporary structures. As real, permitted, permanently habitable homes that can serve either as a primary residence or as an accessory dwelling unit on a property that already has a house.
This is the kind of policy shift the tiny house movement has been asking for since the beginning, and we first saw it covered by the team at Tru Form Tiny, the Eugene, Oregon builder whose park-model-scale homes fit squarely inside these new rules. We went and pulled the county’s actual determination document so we could walk you through exactly what it says — the freedoms, the fine print, and the parts that trip people up.
Images courtesy of Tru Form Tiny
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