Briliant but had to be creative
This was my 3rd trip. I was excited and nervous just like the others. Once i arrived at my gateway hotel i was able to relax unload grab some food and take a shower to get the plane off me. The next morning like always, we met downstairs in the lobby awaiting for our tour leader. What helped was that i had already spoken to a few trekkers on my tour before hand so saying hello again was like i already knew them. Once i found out who my tour leader was, we sat down together did our introductions and hit the road. My leader had a lot of expectation to live up to as my previous tour leaders were incredible!! Our first day was hitting Philadelphia and Washington DC. Wow. What an amazing couple of days. On my previous tour the first night my leaders cooked for us... on this trip my leader didnt. So he set out a schedule for us and wanted us to cook. Not a huge problem but a little disapointing as most of us were still jet lagged, didnt know each other and were still getting used to how trek worked. (I was the most experienced and probably told the group more info about how it works than my leader). As we moved on throughout the week as a group we all bonded and got on very quickly. Often we would sit by the campfire and eat smores and deink while our leader was on another campsite with another group enjoying their company insyead of ours... again not a huge problem but disappointing as you would have thought he would have wanted to get to know us as the trip is only 12/13 days long? As we moved through into the second week we really bonded together but had to rely on wifi and someones GPS to get us information about places and things to do. Overall, there was times we were waiting around to waist time to get to our next destination instead of finding something to do and ther wasnt a lot of knowledge known about each place from our leader until we got to his homeland in NYC. It was only until the last 3 days where we would camp together, eat amores together, drink together etc. and i think by that point i was really tired of the 4am wake up calls and overall couldnt be bothered making effort with the leader by this point. As always, i was polite and engaged with him but would always go on about leaving tips for him at the end something he really pushed us for.
