Kids These Days

Back in 1987, my Girl Scout troop visited National Center West in Ten Sleep, WY, which at the time was one of the national Girl Scout centers.  I believe GSUSA sold NCW in 1989.  If anyone else would like to share any stories about NCW, I’d love to hear them!

Well, our troop (and a few additional girls) embarked on a three week cross country trip from Athens, GA to Ten Sleep and back again in between my eighth and ninth grade years.  Yep, a van full of 13 and 14 year olds cooped up in a van day after day.  We were not down by the river, though.  Now that I am older and a GS Leader, I don’t know what the heck Mrs. Vickers was smoking to come up with this.  But I’m truly thankful she did.  We didn’t just go to NCW and back, we also visited places like the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, Zion National Park, Mount Rushmore, the St. Louis Arch, and many, many points in between.  We stayed at NCW for one week in tents in a primitive camping site.  

I’ll be writing a lot, lot more about my memories and this trip (and the other ones!) in the months to come, but the other day, I realized how good kids these days have it.  Yes, this is a “we walked uphill both ways to school in the snow every day – and weeee liked it!” kind of post.  BTW, there were only two chaperones on this trip – Mrs. Vickers, our troop leader, and Beth C/T, a mid twenties young woman who worked at the NE Georgia Council at the time.  She drove the WHOLE DANG WAY!!  Craziness!!!  Where ever she is, I’m sure she’s scarred for life after this experience.  😉

Now that you’ve gotten the picture about the trip itself, we’ll get back to how we got there.  Did I mention there were ten 13 to 14 yr olds in a van?  For two weeks (not counting the week at NCW)!  So what do most people do in long car trips?  Listen to music.  The van we rented did not have a tape player and the radio barely worked, but all of us brought Walkmans or small tape players anyway.  I think someone even brought a small boom box.  Who knows, as old as this van was, it might have had an 8 track player.  More about the van in a later blog post.

My husband owns an iPod that’s got 160 gig.  That’s about 30,000 songs, right?  Well, we were severely limited on space, so we could only bring a few tapes per girl, and we passed around the ones we liked.  You remember how bulky those cassette tape cases were – and how they completely fell apart and cracked if you dropped them?  I brought some mix tapes, but there were three albums I distinctly remember listening to over and over and over and over again – to the point where the square piece of felt between the cassette and the tape almost fell off.  Sometimes you could glue it back in place, but usually the tape was toast at that point.

I brought a dubbed copy of Prince’s (was he Prince or that symbol thingy?) Sign ‘O’ the Times, the Beverly Hills Cop 2 soundtrack (even though I hadn’t seen the movie at the time), and George Michael’s Faith (I thought I was really pushing the limits listening to I Want Your Sex!  ).  I also had some mix tapes of songs recorded off the radio that cut off early or ones where the intro is missing because of the stupid DJ or commercials.  We want to hear the song, not you Mr. DJ!  Bah!  My Sign ‘O’ the Times tape cut off early because the 90 minute tape wasn’t quite long enough to get the whole album on it.  I bet if I listened to it again, my mind would be waiting for the cut off at any second on a certain song just out of habit.  FWIW, I don’t think I’ve listened to any of those albums at all since that trip.

There was radio – sort of – but it was mostly country, ministers preachin’ the gospel, and static.  If we went through a metro area, someone would always yell out, “Turn to 96.2!” so that we could listen to some kind of variety of pop music.  However, it was short lived and only lasted about an hour depending on the station’s strength.  Sometimes there would only be static and no preachin’.  We got so desperate at times that we would even scan the AM stations.  Now THAT’s desperate.

So get that, kids of today.  Hold your iPod tight and kiss it, because you could have been born in an earlier decade and would have every. single. song. on an album memorized on a lengthy trip.  And no movies!!!  But, you don’t have Casey Kasem filling you in on little nuggets of trivia about songs or the artists.  I know about Vegemite because Casey told us what it was before we found out where Men at Work’s Down Under fell on the countdown.

Keep in mind that those were also the days of no cell phone  – maybe a pay phone if it worked – and traveler’s checks.  Check back for more interesting stories from the “Trip Out West!”