Key Largo

Okay...so my meeting last week.....

As I mentioned in a previous post..it was 48 hours before I got to take a minute to enjoy my view...and it was brief because then we headed out for teambuilding..but I'm getting ahead of myself....

Tuesday night we had 10 minutes to change for the evening and then headed over for those activities.... we had to build a race car out of various fruits and vegatables. We had to use at least a part of every food item on our table - and could only attach them using wooden skewers. Despite the fact that half the team are engineerings - with 3 of us being MECHANICAL engineers...our car sucked. Although in our defense....we actually made something that resembled a car....some of the other items were crazy...not at all car like. It was this evening we learned about the "nosiqutos" as they called them there...because the mosquitos were SOOO tiny you can barely see them....so we had to COVER ourselves in Off..and then were sweaty and stinky the rest of the evening. Dinner was outside that night as well...and let me tell you....I've NEVER been so happy to see a shower as I was when I got back to my room that night.

Wed night was the beginning of our etiqutte@work training. Throughout our dinner that evening we learned all about proper etiquette at a formal business dinner. Meant it took a REALLY long time to eat as we had to learn the proper steps every minute of the meal....but I did pick up a few interesting things. After that I headed to the bar with a group of folks for a few hours.

Thursday the meeting was only half day with team building in the afternoon. I wish I could say this was awesome since it was when we finally got to actually see where we were and enjoy the beauty of our resort. Alas...we were sadly dissapointed. The first thing we had to do was build a boat out of three sheets of cardboard, some plastic sheeting, and duct tape. We had 10 minutes to design, and 30 minutes to build. And then two people had to get in and race the boat around the lagoon. We were THRILLED when the race took off as our boat quickly took a strong lead (while 4 of 7 teams immediately sunk). Then as we were nearing the finish line - one of the fallen teams sabotaged our boat.... We were HEARTBROKEN. And feeling very mean towards that team the remainder of the day - and really had no interest in further competetion at that point. Sadly our afternoon was just beginning. After that we had a volleyball competition, followed by a weird water balloon human slingshot with us as human targets (this one sounded dangerous...but we reported no injuries). Then onto the next event...a kayak relay race where the front passenger needs to collect tennis balls in the lagoon while the back paddles. My partner and I were the 3rd to go on our team...and by the time we got out there we had to go all the way to the far side of the lagoon for balls. A little mishap had us roll..and fall out of our kayak (with the speed of the even no one buckled themselves in). We were unable to get BACK in our kayak..so we gathered our balls and started swimming back with our kayak in tow. Remember...I said we were ALL THE WAY ON THE FAR END OF THE LAGOON..... I was SOOOOO tired....about halfway back we decided we couldnt' swim the entire way...but we were fairly close to the shore up the beach a bit...so we'd swim to there and get out and carry our kayak back to our team. well.....even then...I was so tired from power swimming...when I went to stand up my legs gave out....and I landed right on my left leg where I hurt myself when I fell down the stairs..not pretty.... I was also unable to lift the kayak...so thank good for my team member picking up the slack (the rest of our team was not able to help us at that point). Luckily the balls all got collected and we didn't have to make a second attempt at this event. After that was tug of war...with no gloves.....so....nice and ripped up hands...AND...when our team went down...I fell and landed on the OTHER leg where I hurt myself when I fell down the stairs. Oh...and the man made beach where all this was happening was NOT soft to walk on at all...and most of us had left our shoes back where the boat building event had occured...and the sand was softer.... So everyone feet were dying from the rough sand by the end.

SOOOOO......now you know why i was too tired to blog on Friday!!!!!!!!

Anyway, after showering and getting all the sand out of my wet clothes from teambuilding (since they had to be packed that night) we had a tropical themed dinner on the beach. This was probably the NICEST thing we did....it had cooled off....the bugs weren't out...and we just had some good drinks...some great food...and good fun.

Friday was morning meetings and then traveling all afternoon to get home.

And that was my trip to Key Largo in a nutshell. I'm wishing we'd just gone someplace colder like last year (in Baltimore) so we wouldn't have been sad to miss out on enjoying the locale where the meeting was.