I love pancakes. What goes with pancakes? Maple syrup. What has maple in the name? Maple Ridge, and that’s where I was last week.

We had an extra trip this year for PLP. It was different from the Alberta trip and the Oregon trip. Instead of focusing on something like geography, or making ads, we focused on working as a team. That includes things like trust and leadership activities. Even through there wasn’t travel like Oregon or views like Alberta, this might have been my favourite PLP trip yet. 

Driving Question

Our big idea for this trip was “How do the choices we make set our future path?”. The best way I thought of understanding this driving question was by making it into something like a tree. There are points where other branches branch off, and those points are the decisions you make in life. If you make one different choice you can end up on a completely different side of the tree so it’s important you try and make the right decisions and choices in life.

Outside Activities

The best way to describe what we did was by separating it into two sections, Team Building, and Leadership. Most of our team building activities were outside. Some of my favourite ones were high ropes, shelter building, and archery. A very good part of the team building activities was that for each activity it was a different group of people. Because we have such a big group it’s not often you get to work with all of your classmates at some point in one week.

Inside Activities

Along side the outside activities, we also had inside ones. These included more team building exercises and leadership activities. In the beginning of our trip we did a questionnaire type thing that in the end told us what type of leader we were. Along with those activities we also did some exercises trying to figure out some things about what kind of norms we want in our class.

This was one of my favourite trips and I wasn’t tired by the end. I felt like I could’ve stayed much longer, and I wanted to. It reminded me of Big White with the dinning hall, sleeping rooms, and doing activities all day. Compared to other trips this one felt more normal and I think that’s why I liked it so much.