Sorority Sisterhood Retreat- Need Ideas!

[Tigger11]

Hi everyone! I am in charge of planning a sisterhood retreat for my sorority this coming September and I need some help on ideas. My school is in Central Texas, within an hour and a half drive to Dallas or Austin. The university is pretty conservative, and there is a very strict no alcohol policy. Our chapter size is 150 girls, but realistically, I would only count on roughly 100 girls for a retreat since they are always on the weekend. The retreat can be overnight as it has been in the past, or it can be just a day event. The point is just for the girls to spend time together, there will be no programming/standards involved. I thought it would be fun to take some busses down to Austin for a cooking class, but every place I've talked to only takes about 15 people, and we have about 100. We've also considered taking a train to Austin, Dallas, or Fort Worth for shopping, dinner, and maybe something else, but there is no return trips on the train for the same day, which means staying overnight after we've already paid for the train, dinner, etc. and that gets expensive.

Some things we have done in the past:
- Rented out gymnastics center for New Member retreats the past 2 years
- Dinner, decades themed dress, and rented out roller skating rink for all night
- Six Flags day retreat
- River cruise dinner on Lake Austin

And that's all I could think of off the top of my head right now. But I'd like to avoid doing these things again simply because we need variety. Any suggestions would be EXTREMELY helpful!

[VandalSquirrel]

You should look into white water rafting and perhaps camping the night before or after you raft. My chapter (and other sororities on campus and at a neighboring school) go rafting for Bid Day and it is a lot of fun. Sure you're asking about a retreat but the idea is the same. Sisters spending time together doing something but not any programming. We have a camp fire, roast marshmallows, etc. and all the girls can work on their tans if they so desire.

A google search came up with www.texasrafting.com and lists water near Austin - Roundrock if that helps.

[DDDlady]

Some things that chapters on our campus have done in the past are... going to a water park for the day, our philanthropy is St. Jude and we are within a semi reasonable distance to St. Jude so we went to the Target house and had a pizza party for the kids. Probably the best chapter retreat we had was a trip to see a Broadway show. We took buses to the show and then had dinner after. PS- all of these were done with a chapter of about 150 people.