Re: Advice request: traveling for the first time
 

Cynette- thanks for the tip! I don't always think to check the white papers for non-technical things. I'll read through that.

PS: I understand Raymond H. was with Rolling Thunder in 2014. As his family moved here to Pittsburgh, he worked with 2656 this season. He's had a lot of good things to say about 1511!

Re: Advice request: traveling for the first time
 

We go to a regional about 2 hours away from us every other year and to CMP this year (10-12hr drive)

Since we don't have a ton of money and are a relatively small team, we borrow and/or rent vans to drive to the event. This has worked fine for us. Also helps when drive team needs to get to the event site early and the rest of the the
team can sleep in a bit. We also charge a fee from each student to help pay for van and hotel cost (for us it was $100 for CMP and $75 for our regional)

For CMP this year, we had a parent volunteer to handle all of the food, mostly due to several students with severe allergies, but that was a great decision. One of the vans carried all of the food and then one of the mentors would keep all of the food in their hotel room and we would set up a makeshift buffet line for breakfast, dinner, and snacks for the scouting team late at night. Worked great and we'll stick with it

At the event, we made sure everyone swapped cell phone numbers, paired up with another student, and we also set up a central meeting area where we could get a head count before we left each day (lobbies of event buildings work great, team pit works well if you're small).

Hope this helps!