<p>We investigated Rustic Pathways a couple of years ago and they were very expensive considering just how “rustic” the experience was compared to some of the mission trips that a lot of churches do all over the world. I actually started a thread on this last year and a poster told a scary story of how his group lost him in the middle of nowhere in southeast Asia and he or she thought they would never get back home due to the language barriers,etc.
I would also caution parents against these high school “discount” tour operators. We just had an awful experience with Explorica in March in Ireland and I think for about the same amount of money as they charged you would be better going with a really reputable company like Globus or Trafalgar.
If they say they are cheap, believe me they cut corners and cheat you evey chance they get. We were guaranteed full Irish breakfast daily, all we got was stale cold cereal,milk,juice and coffee. Our “Irish” tour guide was a Polish taxi driver doing this as a part time gig-don’t know if they do background checks and I did not like how he looked at the girls on our trip. Needless to say his knowledge of English was poor as was his knowledge of Ireland. So much for this being an educational trip.
They put us up in a hotel in the most dangerous part of Dublin-we could not dare walk across the street for fear of being mugged or robbed-we were told not to do it. Our other hotel in western Ireland was supposed to be in Galway. We were lodged an hour and half from the city in a hotel that was still closed for the winter-we were the only occupants and they refused to turn on the heat, served us rotten food (of course our guide couldn’t be bothered to warn us of this when he saw his food was bad, he just let us all risk getting food poisoning in a foreign country). The phones in the rooms did not work and there were not hotel staff on the premises at any time-so no security,no way to call for help if there was an emergency. My travel alarm clock displayed a temp reading of 59 degrees! The water in the bathroom faucet was brown and stayed that way. I could go on and on, but really be careful about doing these kind of trips on the cheap. I have traveled extensively to England, France, Italy, Greece and could not wait for this trip to be over it was so bad.</p>