Twenty-five years, one fall trip a year, and a friendship that's outlasted flip phones, group texts, and whatever came before both.
We were sorority sisters, pledge class of 1991. Ten years later, we had started building careers, relationships, and busy lives. The first trip was during the fall of 2001 — a moment in which all of us wanted to reconnect. Of course we chose to go back to the beginning, wandering our old Ithaca stomping grounds and seeing all the sites we were always too buried in homework to visit.
We've gotten together every fall since. We missed exactly two: one year when two of us hit late-stage pregnancy on opposite coasts at the same time, and one COVID year that nobody's counting against us.
For most of those years, one of us did the chasing — the "who's in," the "when works," the fourteen half-finished polls in a group text that used to be an email.
Then one year, two of us were killing time with bloody marys in the Denver airport and built a spreadsheet just to keep everyone straight — who's paying for what, who's flying when, who still hasn't voted. It was so much better than anything we'd used before that we looked at each other and said: this should be a thing other people get to have.
That spreadsheet is the reason Girls Weekend exists.
We built it because we've already spent 25 years figuring out how to do this well, and it just seems unfair to keep it to ourselves.
Your group's tradition starts with one vote.