Okay, here's my take on all of this, and Pfizzle, I understand where you're coming from...
I've done the local car club thing, and that was tough. 15 of us...We only lived 10-15 minutes away from everyone else so meetings shouldn't have been a problem. The thing is, some people work days, others work nights. Some work all weekend, others may have it off.
Back to the Protege club

Here in Northern CA(the Sacramento meets), we haven't had the best turnouts. 3 meets:2 of them only me and Option(who doesn't even have a Mazda yet) showed up. The third went well. We just don't have enough members on this board from the Sacramento area. I'm thinking if we do this, the Bay Area crew will need their own chapter. That way, they can do their own thing, and regulate stuff better(Highway 9 run for example).
I know you SoCal people can get this going for sure. The Bay Area seems to have a good amount of cars. We have about 5 that might come to Sacramento meets. Between the Bay area and Sacramento people, we need to meet up and figure out what people would go to which meetings(which is closer driving distance).
I'm not sure how many poeple will read this, but we need to find out how many people from the Sacramento area are interested in joining.
Pfizzle, I'll talk to you more about it later. We need input from more northern Cali people in the mean time.