NIU

religious tours

Posted by Stacy on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 7:45 PM

All of the other students in the church and I have finally gotten all of our plans together for our big summer trip to Israel. We got all of our airfares months ago but there were couple of seats that got bumped along the lines and hotel rooms that didn't look like they were going to work out in time for us to all leave at once. We're all going over together as part of a series of young adult religious tours that I have been trying to organize both for fun and for college credit as an independent contract. This will be the first successful trip that I have planned and I think that it is going to go very well. I was a bit nervous about planning the whole thing since everyone would be relying on my being as thorough as possible. I had no idea how to plan a trip for myself let alone and thirty-five people all expecting to have some kind of profound experience. The hardest part so far was just coordinating the missionary flights. There are, I have found, plenty of missionary travel plans and agencies but they are little known in the public so it took a little digging to find them. After trying unsuccessfully to get mainstream airfares I finally found a mission travel agency about a month ago. Their prices allowed me to drop the church airfares prices by about sixty dollars per person. Everyone was so excited when I told them that a few more people signed up at the last minute. Since then I have been dealing with all of the particulars of the hotel arrangements and the actual tour routes. We will be there for about two weeks and it takes a lot of planning to see all of the area in that amount of time. For now though all of these things have fallen in to place and the only thing I can do now is wait and see. When we get there I am sure there will be more issues to work out, but I am totally up for the challenge.