What a great first experience as an outing leader. We picked up the scout trailer on Thursday, Back to School nite for me, spent 3 hours dealing with the same trailer issue we had last time we used it over six months ago. No right brake/turn light. As usual he said, “Nobody said anything to me after summer camp.” Ahh well at least, we got it before friday night, when we needed it. Got the trailer down there and had set up the site by 8 pm, not bad.
Saturday morning we arrived before 8AM and spent the morning organizing the lunch order for the boys/adults. The boys were great about passing out the water that we got donated to our troop for the walkers. Usually American Cancer Society gets the water in a donation, and we just supply the “man power” to give it out and get it cold. This year they asked us to get the water and really pressed us to find a donor for the 2 pallets of water needs (~150 cases). We've passed out their water for about 8 of the last 10 years. We have seen a lot of people grab a bottle of water and drink a small portion of it and toss it or leave it and walk away, so this year we thought a small fee would encourage them to finish it and when they turn it in give them a free one for any empty they returned with. Then we could not only give them all the collected money from the water, we could turn in the recycling and get ACS the money for that as well, seemed win-win for everybody.
Needless to say varying from the norm, was not acceptable. I got reamed by this no name committee member for like 20 minutes. He hollered at me in front of all the scouts and all the relay for life people and just ranted like a fool. He claimed he’d “done” the water for the past 2 yrs and never had ACS charged for water. I let him make a fool of himself as everybody just stood there gawking at him. Fine, we will give out our water for free and we did.
Later when I went to register our troop and make sure we were all signed in, Barbara Mc was very helpful and listened to my story and gave me the name of the ACS guy in charge of the entire area, David Smith, 1043 W. Ave M-4, Ste B, Palmdale, CA 93551, 661) 945-7585 #3. Upon checking the registration status of our group, not a single person showed upon the online list as registered. I had an email with over 18 names on it of team members, but not one showed up on their list. So I filled out 56 forms for our team and signed signatures on all of them, as “chaperone”. 28 participants and not a one were listed with them. << Deep sigh>> they are volunteers, too. Soon after I got back to our site, both David and Arthea – local event chairperson showed up and spent over 20 minutes apologizing for Alan Hefter’s bad behavior and listening our to the rationale behind the small charge, and the fact that the water was not ACS water, but water donated to the BOY SCOUT troop. They agreed that Alan was being unreasonable, but could we please not charge for the water, as it was not previously arranged that we would do that. Fine, whatever they want is fine by me. I am just sorry that I even got involved with the whole thing by this time.
The remainder of the event was in fact uneventful. Saturday after the dark laps, we sold out of quesadilla S’mores in about 2 hours, cleaned up, the young ones crashed, the tweens kept walking and the teens played a dozen or so different games of catch. The adults sort of faded off individually and went to bed.
About 12:30- 1AM, I went to bed. By 5:30 I was up and awake, staggering around counting noses and checking to see that we had all our boys and they had all made it thru the night. Ended up walking about 2 miles total, found Ethan and Adam crashed out in front of the big screen where the movie was shown. JJ was the only one who made it until sunrise, then he crashed about a hour and got up to help break camp down. We were packed and out of there by 9:45 and home and unpacked by 10:45. Napped until about 3:30 and took the trailer back to Lewis ranch about 6PM.
We earned about $1000 for ACS that weekend. Funny, that’s about what it seemed like it cost me emotionally, too
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