Saturday, May 22, 2010

Trashy Kids!

Today we participated in the Catalina Council Get In The Game Cache In Trash Out. We had about 20-ish folks show up to help clean Escalante Park and learn about geocaching.

Honestly, when Cub Scouts say "conservation project," it often means picking up trash. It's something that most kids can do that they don't have to be trained to do, and it's difficult to do it wrong.

I do get kind of tired of trash pickup, but today's experience was pretty nice. Got to meet some new people and do a little teaching about geocaching. There was a cache right there in the park that had been placed by a couple of cub scouts, so it was a great teaching moment.

We were hoping to have the Council's GITG kit before the CITO, so we could get some travel bugs started and the Pillars of Scouting geocoins. Unfortunately it didn't show up yet, so we had a couple of substitute activities. We showed the PWD car that will get the Race to 2010 travel bug, and passed out some CITO containers--small plastic containers stuffed with plastic bags that can be placed in a cache, to allow other cachers to "trash out" as they leave the cache area.

We've been trying to work with the council for a couple months to get this set up, it's amazingly slow to get something running. And, we have a relatively small council! How do people get anything done at this pace, requiring this level of bugging people?

Maybe I'm just too used to the corporate world, but I'm just saying it is a good thing that "promptness" isn't a scout value.