There are people who refuse to watch the world from the sidelines. They are not tour guides. They are not influencers. They are ordinary people who made extraordinary choices.
They stopped waiting for the right moment and just left. They faced their fears, crossed deserts, met strangers and then decided to do it all over again, bringing others along with them. In this series, WeRoad Group Leaders share how travel can change you, and why doing it together with others can make all the difference.
This is Eileen’s story.
From solo gamer to Lara Croft in real life
For years, Eileen had explored the world through a screen, the pyramids of Egypt with Lara Croft, the jungles with Nathan Drake, other planets with Master Chief. Travel was purely virtual, an adventure to be lived from the couch.
Then someone ghosted her before a flight to Brazil. She booked anyway, alone, but with WeRoad. In the cenotes of the Yucatan, for the first time in her life, she was Lara Croft in the flesh. She had not even made it home before she had already submitted her application to become a Group Leader.
So what drives someone to want to relive that experience again and again, this time bringing others along? We asked her.
IDENTIKIT
- Podcaster & Video Editor
- Germany
- 2 years as WeRoad Group Leader
How did you become a WeRoad Group Leader?
My path was a little unusual. I was already following WeRoad on social media when I reached out them about becoming an influencer, but during the pitch with the marketing team they asked if I wanted to become a Group Leader instead. I said no: I wanted to experience WeRoad as a participant first.
That first trip to Mexico was so incredible that I had not been home for 48 hours before I had already sent in my application, with a fever, because I had caught Covid during the trip. I wanted to give others what I had lived: the push to step outside their comfort zone. Because just a few years earlier I was a video game nerd who only experienced adventures on a screen, and now I was living them for real.
Is there a moment from a trip that you still see when you close your eyes?
I am afraid of heights. And yet in Mexico I jumped off a nine-metre rock into a river. In South Africa I threw myself 70 metres down a canyon. In Lima I went paragliding.
I did not do any of it alone. I did it together with my group: we looked at each other, gave each other courage, and then we jumped. That moment, right before the leap, all of us there on the edge, is the one I still see when I close my eyes. Not for the adrenaline. For what was written on the faces of the people next to me.
What really changes when you travel with people you don’t know?
Joy multiplies, problems get shared. The group becomes a safety net that holds you up in the hard moments and amplifies the beautiful ones.
I have often heard: “Eileen, I would not have done it without you.” And my answer is always the same: “Neither would I without you.” That is what makes group travel something completely different: you are never truly alone, even when you are doing something you never thought you could do.
What does a Group Leader do that travellers never see?
There are things the group never sees. The hours spent before departure studying the destination, the culture, the logistics. But most of all: the constant care for every single person in the group throughout the trip.
Remembering who is afraid of what, who needs a push, who just needs space. Being present without being intrusive. Holding together dynamics that could unravel without anyone noticing. The real magic happens in silence.
From Lara Croft on the controller to Lara Croft in real life, what has really changed?
Every time I jump off a waterfall with my group, I think: this is the scene I once would only have lived through a joystick. The difference is that now my knees hurt afterwards, and it is worth so much more.
Discover them. Fall in love with their stories.
Eileen never stopped loving video games. She just realised that the real world, with the right people beside you, is the most beautiful level of all.
Her story is one of the many that WeRoad Group Leaders carry with them. Not the destination, not the itinerary: the person they were before they left, and the one they became along the way.
On this blog, we share their stories, one at a time. Because behind every WeRoad trip there is always someone who chose to take the leap and then decided never to stop, bringing others along for the ride.
Curious to discover more extraordinary stories from WeRoad Group Leaders? Come and meet Alicia too!
