I just moved back to the New Orleans area from Dallas and was reading about the Sacramento Travel Group that meets monthly. Having made several trips to Europe in the past six years using this site I wanted to ask anyone out there if there is such a group in New Orleans, and if so, how does one become a part of it. If not, is there anyone in NO who would like to help start one? Thanks.
Jim
Hi Jim,
I hope you get some replies from people in the N.O. area. There is no current group there that posts meetings to this site, but there's no reason you can't get one going. That's what I did after I saw the there was a group in Denver. You can start one yourself. What I did was I posted, like you just did, and asked if anyone was interested. We started meeting the summer of 2010 and our group keeps growing. We have regulars, and then we have people who come specifically for help planning a trip. It might take a few months for your group to take off, but you just have to be patient. One thing we have found to be important is to meet at the same place at the same time each month. Some of our regulars aren't on the Helpline much, though that's how they discovered us. They always know where to find us. We started meeting in one place based on where the first people were coming from. We changed to our current location a couple of months later to be more central. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. We have such a great time at our meetings and we get to talk about something we are all passionate about...travel!!
Thank you. I occasionally get on Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree (their TH) which as you might expect covers a much larger part of the world than is done here. I think I will post the same question there and see what happens. I would be interested in learning more about your group, i.e. what you do in meetings, travel sharing, etc.
What do we do at meetings? Well, there is a lot of talking going on!! We are a very informal group. We bring books and maps for places people are going. We bring iPads to look things up on the free wifi that Panera Bread has. That's one reason we meet there. We make suggestions for itineraries, lodging, things to do, etc. for places we've been that others are going to. We usually have at least 6-8 people, but some months it's been 14-17. It's usually somewhere in between, with 10-12. The bigger the group, the more we play musical chairs to try to talk to everyone. Some months it's hard. We start at 10:00 a.m. and leave when we feel like it. People usually trickle out starting around noon. I think our longest meeting lasted until 4:00 p.m. Can you tell we like each other and have lots to talk about? Even our first meeting, I think there were 6 or so of us, lasted 5 hours!
Some groups are more formal with a beginning and ending time. One way to do things is to go around the table and let each person have a turn to talk. Or maybe there is a particular subject such as a certain country or train travel? We don't do that though. We like to keep it casual and talk about whatever people want to talk about.
