Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Tuesday We Get There

Not gonna lie: I secretly thought that Boston was an out-of-pocket choice for my Girl Scout troop's Spring Break trip. All the kids could tell me that they really wanted to do there was go whale-watching and eat seafood, but then I told them that the whale-watching season wouldn't have started yet when we were visiting, and then none of them actually ranked eating seafood like clam chowder or lobster rolls above a 2 on our 1-5 survey, but somehow they all still wanted to go!

My solution for times like these is to LOAD the kids up with ideas and make them look at and evaluate all of them. I put something like 20 places/activities into our planning doc for our 3-day trip, in addition to stuff the kids had found for themselves, and had them all research and rank every. Single. Thing. I built our itinerary around their favorites, stuck in some educational places and activities that were nearby, and padded the whole itinerary out with enough free time that we could hit up anything else that we found out about while we were there--which was so many things!

Spoiler alert: this out-of-pocket place turned into just about the perfect trip! It's definitely my own personal favorite of all of our Girl Scout troop trips, and I think the kids had a blast, too.

On our first day in Boston, it was enough of an accomplishment to fly there, buy Charlie Cards (we were staying in Chelsea, so we bought 7-Day Commuter Rail Zone 1A passes for our three-day trip. Considering that we used the snot out of them on the train, subway, and bus, we still got our money's worth even without using the full date range) at the airport vending machine (fun fact: there's a vending machine WAAAY at the back of the Logan International Airport baggage claim so you can buy your passes without having to take the bus over to Airport Station; we planned to do carry-on only, so we would not have known this if Delta hadn't forced us to "courtesy check" our carry-ons and we would have spent SO much extra time trekking out to Airport Station and back), take the hotel shuttle to the Hampton Inn Boston Logan Airport Chelsea (another one of my partner's brilliant finds! Super close to the train/bus station and to a grocery store), check everyone in, and take everyone over to the Market Basket across the street for grocery shopping. Our rooms all had mini-fridges and microwaves, and our trip budget plan was that the troop would buy groceries for snacks and anyone who wanted to pack lunches and dinners for otherwise "on your own dime" meals. Most people also wanted to use their own money to buy themselves a little stash of their own private snacks, as my own purchase of diet Sprite and Oreo Thins can attest!

After dinner and a lie-down (at least for me!), we met in the lobby of the Hampton Inn--another bonus to this hotel is that it had a really big lobby with lots of tables and chairs!--for a troop meeting. The kids had been wanting to earn the retired Games for Life IPP for a while now, but we'd just never gotten around to it, so I decided we might as well multi-task and turn it into a travel game-themed badge. 

First travel game? Boston BINGO! My partner made super cute blank BINGO cards and printed them two-to-a-page onto cardstock. I brought the cards, pens, and some scrap paper, and bought a couple of pairs of $1 scissors during our grocery shopping trip. I explained the concept of what I wanted us to do, then we all worked for a while on writing out fun BINGO prompts of things to do or see, inside jokes, and little dares, cutting each prompt out, and folding up all the little slips of paper and putting them into a hotel coffee cup. 

We passed the cup around, and each person took a prompt, wrote it in a blank space, and then put the prompt back so someone else could maybe get it. After we'd gone around a couple of times and I'd gotten an idea of the overall tone of the prompts, I also sneakily wrote out a few more and popped them in, ahem. I wanted every kid to have a prompt that was directly about them, and the kids seemed really excited about the prompts that read like little dares. 

When we got to the last couple of rounds I pulled out all the prompts one by one and read them out loud, and people could use their last couple of blanks to "adopt" a prompt if nobody had pulled it yet, or just write one down if it sounded especially fun.

Everyone's BINGO games turned out so great! Here's mine from the first night:

I got to mark one out right away because it turned out that one of the Girl Scouts and I had each discovered the Hallmark channel on our room TVs, and she and I had apparently spent our free hour the same way, lol!

During our meeting I also handed out what would quickly become our least popular troop activity, ahem: Liberty Junior Ranger badge books! I'd baked into our itinerary the five site visits required to earn the badge, and I expected the kids to finish the books in time to turn them in and receive their Junior Ranger badges during our Friday visit to Faneuil Hall. The kids did nooooooot like doing these books, but they were troopers about it, and they knew just as well as I did that I was not letting them leave Boston without a hearty serving of education along with their fun. I mean, for Pete's sake, these are high schoolers here in the Cradle of Liberty--they're dang well going to learn about it while we're here! 

Ahem.

They're lucky that I didn't also make them complete the Boston African American National Historic Site Junior Ranger badge book--instead, I got a couple of copies from one of the park rangers at Faneuil Hall, and my college kid and I are going to do them together and mail them in for our badges next time she comes home. Thank goodness SOMEONE in my life appreciates the joy that is earning Junior Ranger badges!

And, of course, I could not in all good conscience let the kids go out into Boston without having heard this Kingston Trio classic:

After the meeting, when we were all safe and sound back in our rooms prepping for the next day, our first full day in Boston, you'll be thrilled to know that my kids and I found an Office marathon on the hotel TV. It's always a good omen for our travels when the hotel TV has an Office marathon!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!