My egg was a cabin in VT!

I unfortunately was not in class on the day of egg-citment. In fact, I was experiencing my own activates that required much planning and group cooperation – a vacation in Vermont. For the past four years, my friends and I have made an annual pilgrimage to Mount Snow, VT to enjoy the beautiful weather, drown our livers in ungodly amounts of bourbon, and ski or snowboard on the slopes of a pristine mountain. This trip is a prime example of group planning and organization that I will write about in place of the egg-periment. The goals and objectives of my trip were simple; create an affordable vacation package for myself and 13 of my closest friends that included transportation, housing, food, and alcohol.

The first part of this trip was securing the house. Since this is the fourth year we have done this trip, housing is quite easy. My friends and I have created a rapport with a man that owns a house in Mount Snow and have rented from him the previous three years. All that was required in securing the house was to call the owner, make sure the house was available the week we wanted it, and then booking the reservation. The house cost $1100. Split equally among the 14 individuals. I emailed all of my friends and gave them a date by which I needed their money. Once I had all the money collected, I sent the owner of the house a check for the total amount.

The second part was finding transportation for 14 people plus luggage. Being that Mount Snow, VT is often inundated with snow; the only viable option was getting several SUVs. From previous experience, I realized that 2 large SUV would be a tight and uncomfortable squeeze when combined with everyone’s luggage. I opted to find 3 SUVs that would also be inexpensive. This part proved to be quite difficult. I needed to search the Internet for possible options. After exploring various travel engines (such as Expedia and Priceline) AND visiting rental car websites AND constantly re-looking for the newest web deals AND searching various different pickup locations for the cheapest combination, I decided upon Enterprise Rentals. I chose Enterprise for 2 reasons. First, they were the only car company that could guarantee me 3 SUVs at a reasonable price. Second, I live in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. Most car rental locations in NYC charge additional city fees. Enterprise is located just across the George Washington Bridge in Fort lee, NJ. I rented in NJ because it costs half the price then renting the same cars from a Manhattan location – hence keeping my objective of being economical forefront. After including the price of the car, taxes, insurance, and gas (the only estimation), the price per person was $145.00. Again, I sent everyone an email informing them of the latest date they could give me their portion of the car price.

The third part of the trip was food. Feeding 14 people three meals a day plus snacks is not an easy task. The best solution to this problem was to create a meal plan. My friend and I created breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus for a week along with the list of ingredients we would need for each of those menus. We then searched on the Wal-Mart website to estimate the costs for the menus. After which, we created several itemized shopping lists. When we arrived at Wal-Mart, we divided our friends into groups of 4 and told them to collect only the items on their particular list. This made shopping quite effective and fast. Once we reached the checkout counter and received the total ($518.15), we quickly divided this total by 14 and each paid our part ($37.01).

The fourth part of the trip was alcohol. Everyone who went is of legal age. Creating a list of alcohol products/brands that individuals wanted to drink was easy. I had everyone email me their favorite beverages or the alcohol they would most want to drink while on vacation. I then took those responses and found the most popular answers. I created a list of alcohol brands, sizes of the bottles, and mixers we needed to buy. Like the food, we each had an itemized list of alcohol brands/mixers to get and then met at the checkout line. Once all items were scanned, we again divided the total bill and each put in 1/14^th.

This is the fourth year I have done this trip, so I find it to be very systematic at this point, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have backup plans available. I had a second reservation at another car company in case we encountered any problems at Enterprise. I also asked everyone to put an additional $10 dollars into a large communal pot in case we ran short on food/alcohol supplies – a good thing considering we drank 2 bottles of vodka the first night! All in all, practical planning is the key component to a successful trip or a successful egg-cage. Without carefully considering all possible options, you will not arrive at the best solution.