I took the whole Meet&Deal team on a teambuilding trip. Why, when we’ve only been on the market for a year? Mainly because there are more than 10 of us and some people don’t really know each other personally. And also mainly because of the plans for next year. Those are big, and with a drink from Alkohol.cz nicely together in one place, it’s just easier to plan. Don’t feel like reading? Check out the vlog that David and I recorded.

## Better timing I couldn’t have chosen I started planning – we chose a date when most of the team could make it, picked a cottage, and started arranging partners. Thanks to the car from Aspekta, I could comfortably get there with David and Míša, as well as all our things including the package from Alkohol.cz or NaturalProtein. The timing was great. The forecast, not so much. The weather threw a bit of a wrench into our plans. Before the weekend, I thought it would be fine since we were going to the mountains. Well, the water didn’t bother us, but the power outages did. And that for a full 20 hours. But it only brought us closer together. After all, when you’re preparing food under a pergola in the rain on a fire, it has something to it. Big thanks to head chef Dan, who not only came up with what we would eat all weekend, but also made the shopping list and then cooked, grilled, roasted… In short, he prepared all the meals.

## We’re on site We were supposed to meet around 3pm on Friday at the location, which largely worked out, except for two colleagues who got sick and couldn’t make it. A separate chapter was one car, which due to the weather took almost four hours instead of an hour and a half… Oh well. Where were we exactly? We visited the village of Desná, just outside of Jablonec. There was a river there, but it stayed within its banks despite the constant rain. By 8pm everyone was there and we could start. We mixed drinks from Alkohol.cz, some had wine from Vinařství U svatého Martina and some had draft Pilsner, and the bonding began – before the power outage, we even managed to use the hot tub on Friday, phew! We left the big planning for Saturday. But little did we know we’d be without electricity.

## No electricity, no problem Saturday morning, the power still wasn’t on, the hangovers were pretty bad, and we all had dead electronics. What are we going to do, I thought to myself. How are we going to make tea and the planned garlic soup? There was a fireplace outside. We kicked a few energy boosters and Red Bulls, lit a fire in the fireplace, and got to work. Dan cooked the garlic soup, made a goulash, nicely deglazed it with beer – but that ran out on Friday, so Dominik had to run to get a barrel. In the process, he spilled coffee on the sofa, which is already a classic for him. In the meantime, we had tea. And the power came on. And went out. And came on. And went out again. And around 6pm it came on again and thankfully stayed on. Thankfully. We’re charging Macs, iPhones, iPads and getting to work. We start planning – we have the next teambuilding planned and the entire Meet&Deal year 2025 planned! We’ll see you in Prague, Brno and Bratislava too. Will it all happen? I’ll keep that to myself for now, but trust me, you (as always) have a lot to look forward to.

## We’re approaching the finish line I’ve put in a good evening’s work. We also came up with several improvements that we will implement already at Meet&Deal vol3. We continue to bond and get closer. Thanks to the fact that the power is back on, we can enjoy the sauna and cold tub, or ‘tubbing’ (as the copywriter notes 😅) and the hot tub. Even though it was raining into it, we didn’t let that stop us. And we didn’t forget to replenish our fluids either. The fun continued into the late hours, as if Sunday would never come. But it did. We clean up together and head home. I didn’t manage to get it into the vlog, but I’ll tell you here. What do I love about the Mazda CX-60 that Aspekta lent me? – Adaptive cruise control – Head-up display – Heated steering wheel and seats – Plenty of space for all passengers – Lane keeping assist – Apple CarPlay – The design and comfort of a car you want to own I have the Mazda CX-60 in a plug-in hybrid, which hasn’t really thrilled me yet. But that’s probably more because they’ve dug up the road in front of my house, which is how I’d get to the charger. And you, do you go on teambuilding trips?