Greetings and Happy New Year to all as we close another year and start anew. It’s certainly been another good and fun year for our East Iowa Ski Club. I think two big ski trips, a motor coach trip, a few long weekend biking and kayaking weekends, along with the many other social gatherings and events add up to a pretty good year for our East Iowa Ski Club. But as you know all those trips and activities don’t just happen on their own. So, before I leave all these trips and activities, I want to extend my sincere thank you to all on our board. Everything we organize and do as a club doesn’t happen without the help and input from everyone and our board. The other piece that I don’t want to skip over is we don’t have good fun trips and events without all members that signup and participate in these trips and events.
Which now brings me to my primary message for this month. What do we all want to do in 2025? Now is the time when we start our planning for the “next” year. All the planning and hard work of your board, and your trip chairs is all for naught, if we don’t put together the right activities, trips and events that gain the interest of at least a fair number of our members. With a lot of help from our two ski trip chairs, and our members’ support, we did end up supporting two really nice weeklong ski trips for this winter, and, we have a fun group going cruising in April and another fun motor coach trip in the fall. But, for our skiers, can we still support two weeklong ski trips going forward. For our non-ski trips, where does everyone want to go and do for next year? We do have some ideas but again, we need your input. We plan to do another survey at the January Chili and Soup Cookoff meeting so come with your ideas!
Everyone came through in the end to getting us to our minimum numbers on our two ski trips this year, but it felt like it was a bigger challenge than previous years. So, as Steve has presented at our last two meetings, we are thinking of only one big ski trip next year. For now, that would be to Palisades Tahoe, previously known as Squaw Valley. The resort is now a combined 6,000 ski acres. A nice ski resort and in the middle of the Tahoe gambling and resort area.
Then to our nonski trips. Another motor coach trip next year is on the list. An idea is south to the “southern plantation” areas or towards New Orleans. Either would be in the 8-to-10-day range and in the $2,100 range per person. For a second trip, between last year’s surveys and other inputs we have lots of ideas to think about. Among the ideas is the Canadian Rockies by Rail, The Great Rivers of Europe, a small ship Cruise along the coast of Croatia, or another “sailing adventure” like we did off the coast of Maine but this time on the Star Clipper fleet in the Bahamas. I share these ideas as these trips would be considerably more than our motor coach trips. As a rough ballpark, these would most likely be 10-to-14-day trips, and, in the $4,000 to $6,000 range. As always, we work hard to find the best and best valued trip wherever we go. We also want to mention another Lake of the Woods fishing trip. At the December meeting we put an interest sheet out to see if there was any interest. Unfortunately, there only five people that signed it as interested so that’s not enough to make it go.
So, I ask that you give our club trips some thought so that we can work on, and plan trips that would gain the most interest from our members. Again, bring and share your thoughts at the January meeting.