Junior Journey Weekend

Over the weekend, we traveled on a magical journey to the land of aMUSE where we discovered, connected, and took action!  Well, not really….

FWIW, if you came across this post looking for a guide to do the aMUSE journey in a weekend or a day, you’re better off checking out a page like this.  Or this.  This blog post is only my experience with doing one and not necessarily HOW to do one. 

As you all know, you have to complete at least one journey in order to earn your Bronze.  I thought knocking it out in one weekend up at Camp WaBak would solve this issue because I’m not a fan of journeys (who is other than GSUSA?).  So I had been planning it for quite some time and was really excited about it (the weekend, not the journey itself).  Well, last Thursday, I received a call from the parent who was going with us stating she had the flu!  WHAT!  I asked the other two parents if they could fill in and even asked a few of my “retired” leader friends as backups.  Nobody could do it.  So I immediately fell into my Eeyore persona and sang a few verses of:

But then we were saved, because one of the parents cancelled her plans so that we didn’t have to.  Hooray! I was back in Tigger mode!

We chose the aMUSE journey because we gained a new troop member this year who had already completed two journeys with her other troop and that was the one she hadn’t done.  Turns out she couldn’t go on the trip.  Go figure.  BUT she says she’s going to work on it on her own, so allrighty then.

I purchased the Action Journey in a Bag (FWIW, it comes in a box) from MakingFriends.com to make this as easy as possible and borrowed the Leader and Girl book from our service unit’s library.

I had this weekend all planned out and had even created a schedule.  You go, Amy! We stayed at the Lucille Smith Cabin which isn’t on the main camp but is still considered part of WaBak.  It’s a neat little cabin, and there’s a HUGE field next to it.  Most leaders don’t know about it.  But it’s a really cool place to go.  On a clear night with very little moonlight, you can see the full Milky Way galaxy band stretch across the sky when you stand in the field.  Unfortunately for us, it was cloudy all weekend.  But there was no rain, so I ain’t complaining!

Saturday rolls around, and after our troop’s Daisy meeting, our Juniors meet up at my house, and we roll out!  Here’s a quick tip:  If you’ve got more than one car going to an event, put a car flag on the lead car.  If you get separated in traffic, it’s easy to spot it.  I had at one time looked into getting a troop car flag custom printed online, but it was too cost prohibitive.  So I just use one of my plethora (“Would you say I have a plethora?”) of Georgia Bulldogs car flags.  Just make sure your childproof lock is on so a girl doesn’t lower the window and you lose the flag.

We get up to the Smith cabin, haul everything inside, and then turn the girls loose out into the field.  We let them get their yah-yahs out for a little while and then get to work on the journey.  We get a large chunk of it done and then break for a little while.   Christy (the parent) gets back working with them while I get the charcoals lit since we’re doing some outdoor cooking.  I won’t go into the details, but there was some major leader FAIL going on.  I know, I know, the girls should be doing the cooking and that was my intention, but time ran away from us very quickly, and the journey started to bog down.  However, they DID pick out what they wanted for dinner and breakfast at the previous troop meeting, so here’s the quick rundown.  Dinner:  Dutch oven pizza & grilled foil pack cheesy fries.  Instead of s’mores, one of the girls told us about churros, so we had those later on at our campfire.  Breakfast:  Ham (I told them they had to have at least one protein), cinnamon rolls, and apple slices.  We cooked breakfast in the oven.  Note to self:  During the next Journey Weekend, just forego the outdoor cooking.  Oh, and another note to self: Don’t use old charcoal, bring more than one lighter, and cook the food longer than the instructions say.

Here are some pictures:

We got halfway through the Journey before dinner.  The girls were bored of the Journey, and so was I. (This has nothing to do with the MakingFriends pack BTW – it’s the Journey itself.)  We ate dinner, and the intention was to get back to it and finish up leaving the morning for a Big Boy hike or whatever they wanted to do.  Well, after dinner the girls started making up skits while they arranged the mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor and were having a grand time.

At this point, I started thinking.  We were halfway through our Journey and still had a lot to do.  And honestly, the whole point of the weekend was to get this thing over and done with.  But, they were having a lot of fun.  While writing this blog for the past year or so, I realized that almost all of my fond GS memories had nothing to do with skills I learned from badges or specific activities – it had to do with what we did in our free time, what crazy stuff we came up with while working on whatever project, and what funny things happened between attractions on trips.  I’m not saying that badges and awards and service projects aren’t important, because they are – I just think we volunteers get so focused on what we’ve got to get accomplished that we forget what comes in between.

So I said let’s just not worry about the Journey for the rest of this trip.  We’ll do a little bit of it during each meeting and eventually get it done.  If giving up on the Journey during this weekend makes me a slack leader, well, then I’m a slack leader.

After a little while, we start up the campfire and cook the churros.  They are a little harder to cook than marshmallows, that’s for sure!  But Mia was an experienced churros cook and showed us how to make them.

The campfire was extinguished, and the girls came back and started making origami.  Yes, you read that right! We made origami at our last meeting while working on the retired Art in 3-D badge, and apparently it was a big hit because they all brought paper and origami books with them this weekend.

Eventually bedtime rolled around, but before we all went to sleep, we had this conversation:

Me: Who wants to hike Big Boy in the morning??
All except Haleigh: YEAH!
Me:  Haleigh, you don’t want to?
Haleigh:  Eh, not really.
Me:  You’ll get a patch.
Haleigh:  OK then.

Bribery for the win!  I’ll post our Big Boy experience in a separate post once I get some really cool pictures forwarded to me.