Camping - Girl Scout Style

OK, I promised you another Girl Scout story. Well, you all know I'm pretty careful with money...all right, I admit it, I'm a cheapskate! But I'm even more careful with money that is not my own. I've been a troop leader for a long time and every year the girls sell cookies to help fund their activities. About 10 years ago, we had built our account up to aroud $800 and my co-leader wanted to take the girls camping, so that is what we did. But that's a story for another time.

This year (and last year) my girls sold tons of cookies! More than we have ever sold, in fact. As we were looking at our financial reports, we realized we had almost $1200 in our account. Normally, if I have $300 to start the new scout year I am ecstatic, so this was an amazing amount of money for the troop.

When I asked the girls what they would like to do, Princess spoke up that she would love to go to Tuacahn. For those of you who live outside the state of Utah, Tuacahn is an outdoor amphitheater in St. George where they put on Broadway-caliber shows. I'd never been before, but I heard their shows were awesome!

No pics allowed in the amphitheater, so we took this outside.

Other girls quickly seconded the motion, and the idea of a road trip was born. Now my youngest scouts are only six years old, so I was afraid that parents might not like us taking them all the way across the state just to see a play (and I was a little right, one set of parents opted to pass this time), but everyone else seemed fine with it. I made reservations at a St. George Best Western and bought the tickets to see
Aladdin.

We left promptly at 2:30 last Friday afternoon. We had three vehicles traveling in our group and we wanted to arrive before 7:00. The show started at 8:45 but we needed to feed the girls and check into the hotel before we took the 20-minute drive to Tuacahn.

Scout

We managed the drive with only one potty stop and one rain storm just outside Cedar City. We rolled into the Little Caesar's and picked up our pizzas at about 7:10. By 7:25 we were checked in and the girls were rapidly filling their tummies with cheese and pepperoni. At 8:05 we piled in the van and headed for the amphitheater. My sweetie nicely drove us to St. George and then offered to take care of Baby Doll in the room while we all went to the show. (That's why I married this guy!)

Baby Doll and Mabel

The tickets were terribly expensive by my standards, but cheap compared to other venues. I know when we saw Wicked in Los Angeles we paid twice the price per seat, but that was my money and this was the troop's money. We sat in the cheapest seats, but they were still great. We were spread out over four areas but all in the same section. Thankfully, we had enough adults to sit with each group of girls.

The show was even better than I was hoping! They had live camels and the part about the Cave of Wonders? It was all done in 3D. They even climbed on a "magic carpet" and sailed out over the audience! The girls loved it!

Princess is always dancing!

We got back to our rooms about 11:45 and sent the girls all off to bed (although I heard they were up half the night...). The scouts were all in two adjoining rooms with Princess and Prima Donna in charge. We were right next door, but they didn't need us.

We woke them for free breakfast around 8:00 and I told them if they hurried there would be time to swim before we checked out. They opted for the outdoor pool with the fun waterfall. Teach and I donned our suits to play lifeguards and my sweetie snapped the pics.

Not exactly pine trees!

After an hour we gathered up our rooms and checked out of the hotel. I thought the girls would sleep the entire ride home but they didn't. We stopped about halfway and picked up some fried chicken and corn dogs for lunch. We dropped off the girls just after 3:00 at their houses and then my sweetie and I went home and took a nap.

Now that's my kind of camping!