Start A Trip

So You want to plan a trip, eh? Good news! It's not complicated at all. The bad news? It takes a little bit of work. The following is an excerpt from The Penn State Outing Club's WILD program. If you want more in-depth instruction and a pretty comprehensive training weekend consider going on a WILD weekend.

The outing club does a bunch of trips and only a handful of them are planned more than a few weeks before hand. A lot of trips are based upon whims and sudden desires to go someplace and do something cool. The process from idea to completing a trip is a long one, but it can be made much easier if you are organized and know what you need to do and when to do it.

Picking a Location

Arguably the hardest thing to do for a trip is actually picking where and when to go. There is no limit to the number of places a trip can head off to. Everything from a stargazing expedition to an advanced weekend hike has been planned successfully. If you’re having trouble deciding where to go but have an idea of what you want to do, ask some of the older members in the club. Chances are we’ve been to a place that fits your desire. If it’s the other way around we might be able to suggest a plan of things to do while on your trip. Once you have a location you can usually seek out maps from other members of the club or contact the local group in charge of maintaing the area. Most organizations will send you a map for free, or at the cost of mailing it to you. After you have a rough idea of what the area is like you can begin to form an initial route and activity list.

Getting the word out

Knowing where, when, and what you want to do you can then announce the trip at a meeting or send a message out on the listserv. You will usually get a large number of people who express interest in learning about your trip, but don’t know exactly if they can go yet. Don’t panic if you get 20 people interested in a trip that you only wanted to take 5-6 people on. This happens on every trip. If you are actually worried about not being able to take everyone you can say the trip is full and start a waiting list.

Organizing a group

The mass of humanity you have assembled by announcing the trip is no more organized than you are. You should make a spreadsheet or just a plain list of all the people interested, their emails, and any notes you want to make at this time. This makes it a lot easier to send emails to the group and reduces the chance of you missing someone. Keep in contact with your group. This doesn’t mean you should email them every day, but you should let them know of any developments in the trip.

Gear

One of the first questions you should ask along the way is what gear do people need. Tents, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, backpacks, and just about anything other than shoes can begged, borrowed, or bought. You should know what gear people need and get it to them well before you confirm them for a trip, but if you’re having trouble talk to an officer.

People

Depending on the type of trip you should slowly begin to trim down the number of people. Some people will drop fairly quickly allowing you to meet your target amount. As a general rule if you send out an email and don’t receive one back or that person does not talk to you at a meeting you can assume that the person is no longer interested in your trip. We get all types in the outing club, so inevitably someone will come along and do something unexpected. The best way to handle this is place yourself in the person’s position and do what you would like to be done to you.

Timing

As for when you should do all these things, the only hard and fast times you need to worry about are the club sports deadlines. Those being 10 days prior to departure you need to have a trip form submitted and 3 days before departure you need to have the itinerary completed and submitted. Other than that the timing is pretty much up to you. A good time scale is to aim about three weeks ahead for planning a trip and have an idea of who’s going when you start the paperwork. You can modify the roster at any time up to approval with no worries. Major changes after the approval can remove the approval, but often times it goes right back up.

What to Expect on Departure

The last email you should send should be the night before. If you’re lucky the people who plan on not showing up will let you know so you don’t have to wait for them. On average you will lose between 10-20% of your group the day of. If you have an awesome group you might leave with everybody that was supposed to go. If someone does bail last minute, you should call it in to club sports or an officer. Hopefully this doesn’t jeopardize your trip, but if it does you may still be able to go as an unofficial trip. Someone will be late as well, you should wait for this person only as long as you think is necessary. If it has been an hour, you can strike them off the list.