Thinking Day Trip

09/03/19

Today was our annual District Thinking Day trip which I organised as part of my Queen's Guide (full post on the process of organising this trip will come soon!). We took 3 coaches of Rainbows, Brownies, and Guides to Techniquest in Cardiff. We all met in a car park and each unit met all their girls and waited for the coaches. The coaches turned up perfectly on time and we loaded everyone up quickly as it was raining pretty heavily. We only had one unit who were missing one girl by the time we were all on the coach but they managed to contact her and found out she had misread the drop off time but was only across the road so arrived very quickly.

We then set off, in convoy. The girls were remarkably well behaved on the coach, although we did have a near constant chorus of 'are we nearly there yet'..! The drive isn't too bad, about 90 minutes, so we were there pretty quickly. Once we arrived, we got all the girls off the coach and lined them up against the wall while we paid and figured out where they needed to go. Each coach had been assigned a different lunchslot and they put their lunchboxes in big bins so they didn't have to carry them around all day. We then went into the centre - all the leaders were responsible for their own girls during the day, some units just let their girls loose and wandered round keeping an eye on them (there are 2 floors and only one way out) and other units assigned girls to a leader and they had to stay together. Our unit took the latter approach, to a certain extent, in that each leader was responsible for 3/4 girls but we generally let them roam around as long as they were always within eyesight.

The girls had great fun there, with one girl even commenting that is 'wasn't very sciency' so it was great! Each coach was called over the tannoy to go and have their lunch - we had a half hour slot in a cabin round the back of the centre. I also had a list of 15 minute slots that the leaders could go to the gift shop in, as the shop was way too small for us all to descend on it at the end of the visit! Our unit opted to go to the shop just before lunch so the girls could then leave their purchases in their bags. When our lunch slot was called, we all headed across to the cabin and walked in just as a Guide opened her water bottle of lemonade and it squirted straight up, hit the ceiling, and sprayed down over several girls nearby! All the other leaders were staring, gobsmacked at the situation, and then the Guide was stood on the table, wiping it off the ceiling with a paper towel! We sat and ate with our girls and then headed back into the centre.

Each unit also had the option of booking onto the show for the day, Fire vs Ice. There were several showings through the day and we chose the last one. There were two presenters who did a 30 minute show about Fire and Ice through various science experiements, including dropping a bouncy ball in liquid nitrogen to turn it into a 'marble' (it lost all elasticity so just thunked into the ground, instead of bouncing!) and setting alight liquid oxygen. The girls all really enjoyed that part.

Once it was over, we headed to the cabin one last time so we could remake our promises. We got that over and done with very quickly and then dismissed the units one coach at a time to go to the toilet and get on the coaches. Once a coach was full, it headed off. All the coaches then stopped at a services on the way home and the girls bought dinner there (or a second packed lunch in the case of girls with allergies). This is something that all the girls love to do so, even though it is a bit chaotic for the leaders, we tend to do it anyway. It worked quite nicely that we had staggered the coach departures from Techniquest though as it meant we were a bit more spread out at the services as there are not actually enough tables at the one we stopped at for all the girls to be sat down at once. The coaches then headed home once they had finished eating and the leaders handed their girls back to their parents.

The trip went incredibly smoothly and lots of the girls and leaders came up to congratulate me and say it had gone great. Now I just need to write it up and get my District Commissioner to sign me off for that part of my Queen's Guide and I'm one step closer!