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Planning Our KWEST Trip to Ecuador

I’ve alluded to it a lot the past couple of weeks already, but recently, I’ve been doing a lot of planning for my upcoming trip to Ecuador.  Because I got to know one of the travel guides early in the the school year last year, I have taken the lead on a lot of the planning on the trip this year. And boy has it taken quite a bit of time. Fortunately at this point, the itinerary is just about set, and all of us are very excited to leave for the trip in two weeks from today.

At long last, we’re finally only two weeks away from embarking on our trip to Ecuador.  But getting here hasn’t necessarily been easy. In fact, this summer has been and will continue to be busy planning. Because not only did I have school and work this summer,but I also had to help finalize plans for the trip.

Just today we had a 90 minute planning call. On the call, we walked through the details of our itinerary for every single day. We came up with questions for our tour guide.  We thought about the pre-party we’ll have the night before we leave. And we brainstormed games and ice breakers to play not only during the pre=party but also for each day on the trip.

In addition to all of that, we also thought about the packing list we got from our tour guide. We discussed which backpacks we might buy for the trip. How much we planned to spend on all of our items. And also how soon we needed to buy everything given we’re leaving in two weeks.

But even after our 90 minute call, there are still a lot of things we still need to figure out. Later this week, we’ll set up another conference call with the travel planner. And after that, we’ll probably have another phone call later in the week to talk about more of the details.

Why so much planning you ask? Because in the end, these trips are enormously important at Kellogg. It’s the way that 20 students are first introduced to the Kellogg family. And more importantly a way to showcase the teamwork orientation at Kellogg. To help them travel with an interesting group of classmates who they’ve never met before. To give them activities and mixers to meet their classmates. And to facilitate discussions with everyone that don’t focus on work but instead on all the other things that make them unique.

It will definitely be interesting to see who ends up on my trip. Stay tuned to hear more about our trip to KWEST Ecuador.