Back in late October 2014, I realized I had a few days of vacation, so I began brainstorming things I could do while on vacation.
What I wanted to do on my vacation: 1.) explore Iowa, 2.) do something I haven’t done before.
In the brainstorming process, I came up with an idea that I later coined “Choose my adventure.”
The idea: I had my friends and family essentially choose my adventure (vacation). As in, it was like those Goosebumps books in which you get to choose what the character does next. Of course, instead of a fictional character, it was me.
First, people sent me ideas of places in Iowa where I could go. I didn’t have any rules except I asked people to choose places where I could find things to do for an entire day.
With the most popular ideas, I created a list of destination choices for each day of my vacation.
People then voted anonymously for each day’s destination. The place with the most votes was then my destination the following day.
Voting was opened until 11:59 p.m. the previous day, meaning I did not know where I was going until seven or so hours before I began driving to the destinations.
While on the adventure, I used my social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Instagram) to share my experiences. I encouraged friends and family to communicate with me and tell me what to do while I was at my destinations.
At the end of each vacation day, I created and uploaded a video of my adventures onto YouTube. I have posted the YouTube videos below:
Katherine Klingseis 