Oh Angelene! If you qualify for a free membership, you should SO do it! I mean, you may not end up meeting alot of people (b/c there aren't alot of people in your area using it), but what the heck - it's free, and you're not under any obligation to actually meet ANYONE if none of them seem to be a good match! It would give you a great chance to poke around the site and see how it looks, without costing anything - and even if you just meet one nice person, think how awesome that could be!

BTW sorry that your meetup didn't work out! That's a drag . We had a neat paleo oriented meetup going on here that I kept meaning to try out... but never did, and eventually the founder shut down the group and moved on with her life. I regret not having went to any of the events!