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Girl Scouts - Hittin' the Road!

This is the 4th of five posts about Girl Scouts and planning a trip. Click here for the first, second and third entries to get caught up!

After the initial planning meeting with the girls, it's important to get to work setting the date. Amazingly, this proved to be the most difficult of all tasks for our group. As their leaders, we were adamant that every girl get to go on the trip. If a weekend did not work for a particular family, then we crossed it off our list. In the end, I think we trashed eight different weekends due to various scheduling conflicts. It became apparent that we would have to relax our efforts to include every single girl. When we found a weekend where only one girl had to miss the trip, much as we hated to "lose her", we threw in the towel and declared victory on that weekend. This process took - are you ready for this? It took a total of six months. What a nightmare!

After we had finally set the date, I went to work in earnest on booking our accommodations. Since the girls had worked so hard and it seemed to be important to them to stay in a "neat hotel", I strived to do my best to search for a minimum of a 3 Star property. Also, it became apparent almost immediately that a suite would be the most efficient / effective use of our funds. This also offered the added advantage of the girls having a room with two double beds to themselves, leaving the leader of each room to slumber in the fold-out bed in the living area. After approximately eight hours of web and phone research (yes, I am a glutton for punishment, and no, I am not joshing...), I came up with four top choices for the other two leaders' consideration.

As it turned out, we had selected the single busiest weekend in our destination city for the entire month. Other weekends were much freer on space/accommodations, but not ours! This resulted in selecting a hotel property that was a little farther outside the downtown area of St. Louis than we would have liked. However, this wound up being just fine. As leaders, our only disappointment was that we couldn't take advantage of the swanky spa facilities on the property!

Our actual drive from Kansas City to St. Louis went off without a hitch. We took off right after school on a Friday, and one of our leaders had packed sack dinners for each of the girls to eat when she got hungry on the road. Of course, we had assorted snacks for the road trip, as well. My van listened to tunes most of the way, and another van watched a movie. In all, we had three minivans, caravanning to St. Louie!

Well, I am here to tell you that the expressions on a great number of our girls' faces as we entered the hotel made the entire trip worthwhile for me right then and there. Dropped jaws, eyes as big as saucers and even a little jumping up and down in excitement. Very gratifying, I must say. We stayed at the Embassy Suites in St. Charles, MO. Built in 2005, it was beautifully appointed and had an outstanding staff waiting to greet us upon our arrival. When the girls discovered that our rooms were on the 10th floor, all right next to one another (per my request...), two even with adjoining doors, they could hardly contain their enthusiasm any longer. One of the girls just stood outside her room, leaning on the railing that overlooked the huge atrium for about ten minutes. She said it reminded her of what an Italian villa's view might be like. Again, very gratifying indeed.

In my next (and final!) post on this topic, I'll regale you with the tales of what we actually did while in St. Louis. We sure had a great time!