Thoughts so far..

Ok, so I have just finished writing my trip report/diary for the first half of our Trek America trip and need to regroup my thoughts and explain a few things before I go on with the second half.

I say second half, but it's really only the beginning because I have only done 4 weeks so far, and the second half of Trek America was 5 weeks, then a week in Disneyland, then 3 weeks in New Zealand. I still have a lot to write and I am going to try and do 1 a day or something like that to get this done sooner.

So, as I think I metioned in my first Trek America post, me and Gary, and our lovely best friend Kirsty were doing the 'Trailblazer' which was a 9 week trip, whereas the others that we had to say goodbye to were only doing the 'Coast to coast north' trip. We were getting a bunch of new people who were doing the 'Coast to coast south' trip as well as a new tour leader. The other group that were travelling parallel to us were all doing the Trailblazer, so all they had was a new tour leader.

It was really, REALLY sad saying goodbye to the people that were leaving us. I can honestly say now, months later, that they are the nicest most fun people we have ever met and spent time with, and we will genuinely be friends with them forever. I am quite an over emotional person so I cried a lot at their departure. I doubt they will be reading this but if you are, I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!
Seriously, they made the first part of the trip a totally unforgettable experience and I will forever love them for that.

The second part of the trip we had a few issues. I don't really want to write in too much detail about what went on here because, even though only a few of my friends are the only people that are reading this (thanks girls, you know who you are), I realise that I am broadcasting this on the internet for anyone in the world to read. However, I also need to write it all down here because the reason I am doing this is for a memory for myself and I want to be honest and include things that made a huge impact on my trip.
To put it as nicely as I can, there was a person in the first group who was also carrying on the trip with me, Gary and Kirsty and this person had not really got along with the entire first group, who of course we all really loved. When the new group joined, this person decided to say a lot of bad things about us, so we did not have the same group feeling that we did with the first group. To be honest, it didn't really upset me, it was just an inconvenience in getting to know our new group. I am not really the kind of person who is desperate to be popular so I was just as happy with Gary and Kirsty as I would have been with a big group of friends. Regardless of this, the new group eventually realised what was going on and we ended up having some really good fun with them, it was just a very different situation.
The first 2 weeks with the new group were a really hard adjustment for me because of this and a few other things, and because I was really missing the others that had left us.

Of course some good things did come out of this. We became a lot better friends with the people in the other tour group that we hadn't really got to know so well before, we made really good friends with some of them so I am really grateful for that, because we wouldn't have got to know them if we had been so close with our own group.

There were a few other factors that took some of the enjoyment out of the second half of Trek America too. One small thing was that I was really sick for the first week or so. It wasn't the end of the world and I eventually got better, but I totally know the reason why I got sick was because of too much alcohol in the first half, which I do not regret one bit.
The other thing that made the second part less enjoyable was our new tour leader. He was a lot less experienced as Art because it was his first year on the job, and he made quite a lot of mistakes which you will hear about as I go along. I feel really let down by this because I feel like even though the trip was amazing, it would have been even better if we would have had a better leader.

So thats it for now, onto the second part of the trip!!