My Girl Scout Troop Went on a Caribbean Cruise... and on Day #2, We Made it out to Sea!

When we were planning our itinerary, one of the things that revved my Girl Scout troop up the MOST was my comment that, "Hey, Guys, it looks like our AirBnb is really close to a Waffle House!"

Our hometown, you may have gathered, does NOT have a Waffle House.

First, though, let's back up a minute: the previous night, as the kids were running around the two storeys of our AirBnb and claiming bedrooms, investigating the TVs, playing with the light-up toilet bowl--you know, typical AirBnb check-in fun!--all the adults received a text from Carnival saying that our embarkation onto the ship would be delayed by several hours. This was actually great news, as it meant a more relaxed morning in which we could do a little more sightseeing in either Montgomery or Mobile, and it's why, when kids started waking up on this morning, we chose not to hustle. I discovered that our AirBnb's TV had Disney+ and put on Encanto. Adults made coffee, kids tried to obtain said coffee but were turned away, leftover pizza was nibbled at, etc. It was a delightfully leisurely morning...

...until Carnival sent us all ANOTHER text saying that good news! The Ecstasy was actually making great time getting into Mobile, not delayed at all, and that means that you can forget about yesterday's announcement of your embarkation being delayed, because now it's on time again! You can start to board in just a couple of hours, if you want!

You guys. I mean.

Let's just start with the fact that at that moment, we were actually 2.5 hours from Mobile, with kids who were not in "GO GO GO!" mode, as they'd have been if we knew we had to hustle, but were instead in their pajamas bopping along to "We Don't Talk about Bruno." 

Fortunately (this was to turn out NOT to be fortunate at all...), Carnival also scrubbed our half-hour check-in window, and was now giving everyone on the ship permission to show up at anytime during the full five-hour check-in process, so we compromised: we watched the last fifteen minutes of Encanto, THEN switched to "GO GO GO" mode. Everyone packed and completed the AirBnb's check-out chores, we loaded our luggage into the cars, then walked over to the Waffle House where the waitress, taking our orders at the adult table last, told us with amusement that every kid in our party had ordered a waffle.

When In Waffle House!

I'm glad that I forcibly marched everyone to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church the previous evening, because we wouldn't have had time to visit it this morning. We did swing our carpool by the Equal Justice Initiative building on the way out of town, just so we could say that we'd seen it.

On the subject of the EJI, I highly recommend these two books:

• Just Mercy
• The New Jim Crow

When you're motivated to get where you're going, 2.5 hours fly by, and soon we were in Mobile, passing the port where, indeed, Carnival Ecstasy sat in its dock:

Because teenagers are always having things like dance recitals and big soccer games and school plays, part of our Girl Scout troop was meant to take an early morning flight into Mobile and meet us at the port. Another part of our troop longed to see the emo-ness and goth-ness that is the historic Magnolia Cemetery in Mobile, so that's where we paused for a brief pit stop to catch our breath and check in with our flying troop members before driving the entire five minutes over to the port so we could all embark together:

Alas for our well-crafted plans, however, because you know what planes, like Carnival ships, do? They get delayed. And you know what planes, unlike Carnival ships, don't do? They don't make up their delays. After a flurry of text messages, we were faced with the very real possibility that part of our group simply wouldn't make it on time to board the ship with us, and I didn't really have a great Plan B for that scenario.

Eventually, kids and adults decided we'd hang out at the cemetery for a few more minutes, then drive over to the port and just hang out until the arrival of our hopefully on-time troop members, who, barring traffic or traffic accidents of mechanical issues, would screech up to the port just before the boarding window closed.

Let's take deep breaths and look at a few more old monuments, shall we?

I've forgotten what it's like to live in the midst of monuments and memorials to the Confederacy:

I'd also never heard of this author, who was apparently very prolific and very, VERY devoted to the Confederacy. I found some of her books at my local university's library, and I'm curious to read them:

And now, over to our ship!

Point of information: it takes approximately one billion years to check into your cruise. Or maybe it only takes one billion years if your cruise embarkation was delayed and then un-delayed so now the check-in is a free-for-all for the entire ship, which, it turns out, is sold out.

First, there is the traffic jam, which lasts at least an hour and is police-directed. It consists of forty thousand people all trying to drive to the same point, except for one person trying, instead, as she screamed to Matt through her open window, to get to the jail, and could he move his car in a nonexistent direction--up, perhaps?--so she could get past him?

He let her in literally as soon as he could, which was about half an hour after she screamed at him. The other line of cars, at least, seemed excited to have moved up one space.

We were entertained by our ship creeping ever nearer!

The good news is that by the time we got to the port, where, it turned out, we were only giving our bags to the porters before being sent off to off-site parking, it was VERY clear that there was no freaking way the ship would ever leave on time, so the rest of our troop would definitely have time to join us.

In fact, they texted us as we were waiting in the also 45-minute line to get into the offsite parking facility that they'd arrived, so they actually made it there before us.

Also, the line to the off-site facility was only 45 minutes long because it DID NOT MOVE for 45 minutes, because THE GATE WAS LOCKED. A guy was coming with the key, the poor, lone parking guy came down the line to tell every single car. The ship won't leave without you.

We cheered when a golf cart scooted up the sidewalk with The Guy with the Key, only he turned out not to have the key to the padlocked gate, but a bolt cutter to cut the chain holding the gate closed. Problem solved!

You guys, people who've waited in an hours-long line to reach a port, then waited in a 45-minute line to get into a parking facility, and now must wait in another line for a shuttle back to the port do not behave well. Our group of 12 got woefully separated in line, and when my first group of troop kids, with two more groups of troop kids coming who knows how much further behind me, got to the port, I discovered that the workers outside the terminal had insisted that my group who'd flown in not wait for us but instead get in line. You can meet up with your group inside, she told them.

This was A LIE.

So now we had four different groups of people from our troop in different parts of the line, all mixed up between who would eventually be in which stateroom, various boarding passes and IDs in various incorrect hands. It was a HUGE mess, and there was no real way to fix it, considering that we'd all been told to stay in our places in line, and would keep being told that whenever somebody ventured to ask a harried employee. And to be fair, the terminal was absolute chaos, and I don't really blame the employees outside the terminal for their single-minded mission of just getting all these damn idiots in the damn line and keeping them there.

In order to get the correct documents into the correct kids' hands, we resorted to sneaking a kid backward or forward in line to pass a document to the correct group, and then we resigned ourselves to this future promise of all getting to meet up inside.

Here's the inside, where we were still in line, not permitted to get out of line or connect with our group:

Me, too, Terrifying Mardi Gras Clown. Me, too.

Our line snaked through the ground floor of a building, up an escalator, and around and around a waiting area that I bet anything in a less chaotic embarkation would be, say, an EXCELLENT place for a group to all meet up together!

Instead, the line was at theme park levels, perhaps even "First Day of That New Roller Coaster" theme park levels. It was chaos. I was so stressed out.

The front of this first line was a series of stations for getting one's Covid documents verified--every passenger needed their original proof of vaccination and a proof of a negative Covid test taken within the last three days. The person at the head of this line directing people to the various check-in stations was PISSED that our group was so separated, and did not seem to find us blameless for simply doing what her co-workers had told us to do. She also insisted that we simply couldn't get our Covid documents verified unless we were in groups by stateroom--three kids in one room, five kids in another room, and three pairs of adults in two-person rooms. AND she insisted that she had no way to help us get our group together, no way to let us wait until the people farther back could catch up, no way to let us go back to be with them, etc., etc., etc.

I could just see the very last part of our separated group just in front of the escalator, with another group ahead of them (don't tell Carnival, but the group of airplane flyers and my group had sneakily sneaked ourselves together while snaking through the line during the previous hundred hours). So I got frustrated--well, I'd *been* frustrated, so maybe fed up, I guess? Over it? Through with this crappity crap?--and shouted as loudly as I could, "GIRL SCOUTS! GIRL SCOUTS AND GIRL SCOUT CHAPERONES! RIGHT HERE!"

In all the hours we'd spent in Carnival check-in chaos, nobody had gone so far as to SHOUT at anyone before. It was horrifying. But you know what, everyone in that long cattle line let everyone in my troop right past them and right up to the front, and when I turned back to the check-in director person and said, "Okay, we're all here!", she just went on with her business and pointed us to the next open check-in stations.

Where, I swear to god, NOBODY GAVE A FLIP WHAT STATEROOM WE WERE IN FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. The Covid check person was literally just checking Covid documents. For crying out loud I cannot even think about it without feeling my blood pressure go up, and I was just at the walk-in clinic yesterday for an earache and my blood pressure puts me in the range for pre-hypertension although I was also super nervous at the time so that might be why it was high but regardless, I do not need to keep thinking about that freaking check-in person making me yell across an entire terminal in front of every human being on the planet for no freaking reason.

Anyway, now we were at least in our stateroom groups! Which we did not need to be in for the Covid check, nor did we need to be in for the next station, the metal detectors and security belt, but we DID need to be in for the station after that, which was actually checking into our staterooms, so there you go.

I'm pretty sure we could have dithered and waited for each other between the security line and the stateroom check-in line, but whatever.

And guess what happened after the stateroom check-in line?

Finally, we got to get on the ship! It only took... oh, let's say five hours from the moment we left Magnolia Cemetery. 

We waited for each other until our entire group was standing in the entryway of Deck 7, then we had the great amusement of watching the entire troop attempt to figure out how to lead us to our staterooms. Guess my Girl Scouts should have studied their ship map handouts better! They led us upstairs and down, finally found that there's a rough ship map by each elevator, misread that map, led us upstairs and down some more, found the correct deck, misread which way was Odd staterooms and which way was Evens, figured it out, and got us to our rooms.

Here's Will totally bailing on unpacking in her own stateroom so she can come veg out in mine:

We did that relaxing and vegging out thing for approximately ten minutes before I was all, "Oh, crap! It's almost dinnertime!", and went to bang on some Girl Scout doors.

Carnival did an awesome job with their seating arrangement, putting all eight Girl Scouts at one table and all six adult chaperones at the next table over. It was so great to have that relaxing time with other adults every evening--I haven't gone on a vacation with friends since college, and I had completely forgotten how fun it is!

The Girl Scouts and adults spread out to explore the ship after dinner (melting chocolate cake OMG!). Kids needed to be with a buddy or a chaperone until 11:00 pm, and then a chaperone needed to know exactly where they were or be with them at all times. On this night, I was the late-night chaperone, and look who I found when trying to scope out a place I could sit and read while some of the troop was in the teen room, Club O2:

And here I'd almost thought I was joking when I kept saying that Will would spend the entire cruise in the ship's library...

Not gonna lie--on this first night, I found a lot of the ship to be overstimulating. At one point, Matt and I were walking through one of the pathways, an acoustic trio behind us a few decks below singing one song, a cover band ahead of us singing a different song, the casino area where people were apparently allowed to smoke on one side, tables of chit-chatting people drinking and laughing on the other side, and I just kept thinking, "Oh, no. Oh, NO!!!"

Spoiler alert: it got MUCH better.

However, being the late-night chaperone has its privileges. After the teen club, then ice cream, some kids and I walked around the ship a bit more. The on-deck nightlife hadn't really ramped up on this first night, so it was calm, peaceful, and beautiful outside:

I figured I could handle this for five days. 

Here's the first day of our trip, when we drove to Alabama!

And here's my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I sometimes write about our travels as we're traveling them!

My Girl Scout Troop Went on a Caribbean Cruise... and on Day #1, We Made it to Montgomery, Alabama!

You guys, we pulled it off. 

Eight Girl Scouts, ages 13-17, earned all the money for and completely planned a Caribbean cruise. They researched and presented individual proposals for possible trip locations, voted numerous times and revised their plans and voted again, and settled on their trip of a lifetime. They held multiple budget meetings in which they organized our finances. They sold the snot out of Girl Scout cookies for five years, as well as conducting supplementary fundraising projects. They had meetings to plan packing lists, excursions, the budget and itinerary for the road trip down to the cruise port, and to make troop rules and cabin rules. They looked at diagrams of the ship, maps of Cozumel and the Yucatan, and print-outs of menus and activity schedules. They collaborated on a road trip playlist. 

And then, a couple of weeks ago, their six adult chaperones piled them all into three cars and drove them south. 

Our first stop was Nashville, at a sweetly perfect four hours from our home. Leave at 8:00 am on the first day post Daylight Savings, have the kids bring packed lunches that they swear they'll toss the dregs of and not leave scraps of chicken in the chaperones' cars to rot over the five days of our cruise, and you'll arrive at the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park in Nashville at the perfect time for hungry kids to pee, eat lunch, and stretch their legs a bit.

The Nashville Farmer's Market also turned out to be right there across the street from the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, so after we ate some kids and chaperones went to wander the park, and other kids and chaperones went to wander the farmer's market and craft fair. 

I went with the craft fair kids, who all had a little of their own walking around money to spend, and it was a delight. There's a very different vibe to kids who are in charge of their own adventure. Kids who are truly doing their own thing are BUSY! They're totally engaged, they're curious, they're happily smelling different handmade soaps and examining bath bombs and you find yourself promising that when you all get back home, you'll let them plan a meeting in which sure, you'll teach 13 teenagers how to make their own cold-process soap and let them really do it. And yes, you can also teach them how to make those cool poured candles in a teacup. 

Guess I'll be rewriting the retired Folk Arts IPP as my next Girl Scout project!

Here's the packaging from one kid's purchase:

We spent an hour longer than planned in Nashville (oops, but everything was so interesting!), then kept going south for another four hours until we reached our AirBnb in Montgomery, Alabama. 

The kids took a little time to settle in, then we headed out on foot to Google Map our way around for some sightseeing.

Spring was in Montgomery in a way that it wasn't eight hours north, and the kids treated each flowering tree like a celebrity:

We mapped our way to The Legacy Museum, knowing it was closed but still wanting to see it in person. Fortunately, not only did it have a beautiful outdoor memorial to victims of lynching--

--but there was a very kind security guard in front of the building who patiently walked me through a sightseeing path that would take us to Rosa Parks' bus stop and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Then I got confused, so he walked me through that path again. Thank you, kind security guard!

We found Rosa Parks' bus stop!

I thought it was interesting that it has a direct sightline to the capitol building:

The kids were getting tired and wouldn't have said no to heading back to our AirBnb to order many pizzas, but 1) it's best to wear kids out the first night of a trip away from home without their parents so that they sleep well, and then they'll know that they can sleep well away from home and the rest of the trip is that much easier, and 2) the Dexter Avenue Church was just up the street. Obviously, we had to go!

Syd found an old Nutcracker poster. I swear those things follow her!

Okay, the walk was a little longer than I'd anticipated, and I definitely wore the kids out probably more than I ought, considering that we also had to walk home, but look!

Here is where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached for several years, and here is where the Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned.

Here is Will pretending to preach from the landing. She might be a little unclear about what preaching is supposed to look like...

We admired, we took photos, we walked home in the full dark, we ordered pizza, we ate it while watching the Great British Baking Show, then we all went off to bed, because the next day was going to be even more exciting!

Mapping the Yucatan Peninsula

 

I don't even know how I would homeschool without a giant homemade map, y'all. We've been downloading, printing, and taping together these huge Megamaps since Syd was two and Will was three, and now here we are with Syd at fifteen and Will at seventeen, and we're still making and marking up giant maps.

I originally printed and compiled this map of Mexico, and a separate one of North America, for my Girl Scout troop to use during our troop trip planning meetings. It was VERY amusing to unleash a troop of teenagers with a pack of markers onto a map of North America and tell them to label everything they know. Some kids eagerly took marker in hand with a gleam in the eye, and some kids hesitantly took marker in hand with a look that was more like, "Oh, shit...", but everybody was able to label something, and all efforts were praised.

They were ALL hesitant when I then presented them with this map of Mexico and the same instructions, but they gamely went to work and were eventually persuaded that they all knew a little more than they thought they did. We did have a useful conversation, though, about why it is that we don't seem to know very much about the geography of Mexico, seeing as it's just right there below us. 

If you look closely, you can see that placing Mexico City took them a couple of tries...

The troop basically helped my own kiddos get a head start on what is now their map for our Mesoamerica unit study. We're studying the history, geography, geology, environment, and culture of Mesoamerica, with an emphasis on the Maya since theirs is the specific region we'll be visiting on our Girl Scout troop trip to Mexico.

But until we get to go there and look at it all in person, we have to rely on maps! This book is turning out to be the spine of our study so far:

• The Maya

--and on this particular day, the kids transferred much of the information from Chapter 1 onto our map. 

Will was in charge of finding images of the animals that were important to the Ancient Maya, then gluing them to the margin of the map and labeling them: 

She and I also got out the compass so we could draw and label the Chicxulub Crater:

You guys, on our upcoming Girl scout troop trip, our cruise ship will be going RIGHT OVER the crater! And the cenotes that Will and I are going to snorkel in are directly related to that impact!

Fun fact: I am both pretty sure that snorkeling in a cenote is how I die, and also definitely going to go snorkel in a cenote. Life is complicated, y'all. 

Syd was in charge of the task of drawing the main rivers of Mesoamerica:

Fortunately, Jones was there to lend his assistance:

On a previous day, the kids had used the list of important places from this book--

• Maya: Amazing Inventions You Can Build Yourself

--to map and collect images of Ancient Maya sites (I even made them write a paragraph about each site and turned them into adorable flash cards. They're so cute and I love them and the kids are absolutely horrified because they think they're too old for flash cards, my silly little geese), so those are the other little icons you can see on the map:

 

A lot of the map's real estate is wasted at the moment, since we're only studying Mesoamerica and not the rest of Mexico, but now that the kids are old enough to use a large-format map without utterly demolishing it in the process, I think I can hang onto this map even when we're finished and keep it for a future Syd study, at least.

On the Peninsula Trail

 

Here in the Midwest, we're currently wavering between Winter, Part Three and Practice Spring, with temperatures varying anywhere from 35 to 65 depending on the day. 

So one day last week, when the forecast bafflingly called for clear skies and a high in the upper 60s, I declared it Homeschool Field Trip Day. We left our bathroom work crew to go about their day without having to step over or around us every ten minutes and drove out to a spot I've been wanting to visit for years. It's a nature preserve adjacent to million-dollar houses on the shore of one of our nearby lakes, a narrow peninsula that leads a mile straight out, water on both sides of the ridge that you walk along. The parking lot is deliberately pretty small to limit visitors, so despite its beauty it's quiet and fairly unpopulated.

It was the perfect place to spend the day.

It was made clear to me that I apparently spent the entire winter hibernating, because I did not have ANY wind for the unexpectedly steep elevation changes we encountered. I spent most of the hike gasping for air and vowing to get my cardio back on track when, you know, the days are a little more reliably not 40 degrees and raining.

Luna got a little winded, too. 

Good thing the view was so beautiful! Gazing out at the scenery is a great excuse to stop and make sure you're not dying right that second.

My greatest happiness is that my teenagers still bring me awesome rocks to look at.

We have some geology studies that we're VERY low-key working on, so during this field trip I forced the kids to each find three interesting geological things to sketch. 

Will sketched a bluff, and then it was back on our feet for the final leg of our trek!

The trail ended on a dirt beach, with water on three sides and the far lakeshore visible in the distance.

I brought a picnic (that, plus the extra water, hardback book, travel watercolor kit with even more water, and camera might have explained a little bit of my hiking woes...) for us to share, and then I might have had a wee nap while the kids played with Luna, finished their sketches, and also sat quietly to enjoy the day. 

The lake level was very high, I think, so I'll be curious to come back one day in the summer and see what this beach looks like then.

Not gonna lie--the hike back was even tougher!

Will finally took my backpack and gave me Luna, who stopped often enough to sniff stuff that I could save a little face with my rest breaks, and who could generally be relied upon to tow me at least partway up every incline. 

It was a brilliant day, the kind of very early spring adventure that reminds you that yes, pleasant weather IS coming, and full days exploring outdoors will soon be the rule rather than the exception. I think this little hit of Vitamin D will get us through Winter's Last Gasp and into Spring, For Real!