Day 11 - A Recap of the Trip and Preparations for our Presentations - Eli Cunningham

     On this day, we had all made it back to Houston and this would be our first time back at school in almost a week. Because of jet lag, we were allowed to arrive at the school at 11:00am rather than the usual 8:30am which I, myself, and many other students enjoyed and took advantage of (I woke up around 10:00am). 

    Once making it to school, I caught up with my friends on what they had been doing for the past two weeks, then I went to the the room our group was meeting at. I was surprisingly one of the first students to make it into the room, but as time went on more and more sleepy looking students walked through the door and sat down. It was around 11:30 when everyone was actually there, but then we got started discussing how the trip went. Firstly, we thought of and listed all the goals we set out to accomplish on the trip, such as learning about Tucson's culture, bio-diversity, native peoples, bonding with our piers, etc. Secondly, we wrote down our thoughts of how well we accomplished these goals and the conclusion we came to was "pretty dang well". Thirdly, we talked about things we could have improved on the trip or things that went wrong. For this part we thought that nothing actually "went wrong", but we could have improved on a few easy things such as making meeting times when splitting up at a big museum, or reducing the amount of time it takes for 14 people to have a meal at a restaurant. Also, the fourth and last part of our discussion was deciding whether or not this trip should be done in future years. We all unanimously agreed that it should be done in future years and that the trip would also include some of the activities we weren't able to do this time, such as Biosphere 2 ("The World's Largest Earth Science Experiment").

    After taking around 30 minutes to discuss all of this, everyone got to work on their part of the google slides presentation (The presentation to explain to all the students and parents everything about the trip). Our goal was to have everyone finish their parts of the presentation so we could get out of school early and have fun doing whatever, or crash asleep in our beds. It took a little bit longer than expected and we finished around 3:30 when school ended, but we had fun working on it and talking to each other about the memories we had (maybe that's why it took to long).

 Anyway, this is the last blog of the trip and I think I can speak for the whole group when I say we had an amazing time. We experienced such a wide variety of activities, paired with great people to have fun with. Being one of the planners of the trip, it was great to see it truly be put into action and I hope it happens in a future year. Thanks for Reading!