Monday, April 27, 2009

Boy, Another Scouting Adventure!

Seat 4 obnoxious 12-year-old boys, one 13-year-old who doesn’t know that he needs deodorant, and one General Mayhem in a car for 4 hours and what do you get? You get a Boy Scout road trip from Apathy, Kansas, to Hutchinson, Kansas, for a merit badge weekend at the Kansas Cosmophere and Space Center, driven by yours truly. Throw into the mix a caravan of drivers led by the only driver who didn’t have a GPS and didn’t bother to read the map he was given or consult the itinerary that he was given and you get three panicked Cici’s Pizza employees who stared at the sudden Boy Scout invasion in sheer terror while the manager stammered in his best Hispanic accent, “No, no one called ahead for a group tonight.” That’s when the Assistant Scoutmaster decided that maybe someone else should lead the caravan and someone else should read the itinerary since he hadn’t bothered to consult the paperwork. So much for always being prepared.

The impromptu tour of Lawrence, Kansas, added enough time to our trip to make us an hour late after we finally located the Cici’s Pizza in Topeka, Kansas, where we had warned them of our arrival. We ate quickly and departed. I thought that it would be nice for the boys to pass their time in the van by watching movies on the portable video player that we purchased for our Florida trip. I filled a DVD case with a selection of movies that most boys would enjoy, such as Spiderman, X-Men, and Star Wars. The ensuing 60 minute argument made me regret my decision until the group chose Steve Martin’s Pink Panther. Everyone was able to watch except for the stinky 13-year-old who sat shotgun and filled the passenger compartment with a light waft of old cheese. We arrived in Hutchinson near 11 pm. I promptly set up my cot, staked a large tarp over it, crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep.

My first thought the following morning was, “Those boys sure do sound like they’re close by. Sound must travel a long way out here.” When I poked my head out from under the tarp I saw, much to my surprise, thirty Boy Scouts huddled around a single campfire tended by the Scout Master who had the common sense to leave early and head straight to the camp sight the night before while leaving the actual transportation of his scouts to the rest of us. The farmer who allowed us to camp on his property only allowed each troop to light one fire, which meant that I was forced to deal with all those kids before my first pot of coffee. Normally, the dads camp well away from those prepubescent testosterone bombs.

We had two activities last Saturday. Our first stop was at the Hutchinson Salt Mines. http://www.undergroundmuseum.org/index.php I’ve never toured a salt mine before. It was an unusual place to visit. There is a salt vein that runs from western Missouri to western Kansas and from southern Nebraska down to Okalahoma and Texas. In Hutchinson the mine is 700 feet below the surface of the town, and includes a neat storage facility and museum of Hollywood artifacts. The temperature and humidity is a constant 68 degrees and 40% humidity, which make it a perfect storage facility. I learned a lot. If you ever find yourself smack dab in the middle of Kansas, you might consider visiting this place. Until then, the link has some cool information and a short video.

The remainder of the day was spent at the Cosmophere, one of the truly interesting attractions in Kansas. The Cosmosphere is a destination, not just something to do if your flight is diverted or your car breaks down outside of Wichita. This museum contains many interesting artifacts from the US space program, a fascinating history of the development of rocketry, and wonderful educational programs. Saturday’s event was run by a true astronomy geek and former Eagle Scout. One neat item that I learned last weekend was that 11 out of the 12 men who walked on the moon were Eagle Scouts. I don’t know if that excited anyone other General Mayhem. You can find out more about the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Museum at http://www.cosmo.org/

The return trip on Sunday was nominally better than Friday’s adventure. There was no scheduled stop for food and no need to caravan since we all knew how to get home. The five boys in the back of the van reeked of camp fire but were too tired to argue about which movie to watch. They quickly voted on two movies and commenced to watching. I announced that there’d be one stop along the way. It lasted for ten minutes at a rest area on I70. Besides the thunder, lightening, hail, sporadic torrential rains, 40 m.p.h. crosswinds in the Flint Hills, a broken air conditioner that caused severely fogged windows and a shotgun rider who smelled like smoked old cheese, there’s not much to report.

Boy Scout camping. What an adventure!

3 comments:

Timothy Power said...

Hey, Arby. Good to have you back! We've missed you over here. Seems you've picked up a bit of an edge to your writing.... presumably since the last time you were blogging, you didn't have all those PS stories. I have to say, that "amused contempt of Bureaucracy" is sounding a lot less amused....

You know, those salt mines sound interesting, in part because I've actually been in salt mines before. When my dad was stationed in Germany, we took annual trips down to the town of Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian alps, and would take day trips across the Austrian border into Salzburg. And, yup... the town was called Salzburg because of that big vein of Salz running under the ground. As a kid, I particularly liked their underground mode of transportation: they set up pairs of polished wooden rails, maybe six or eight inches apart, and slid down them like long bannisters. I kid you not--they even had these leather butt-protector things that looked like aprons, but were worn backwards, so they wouldn't get rail-burn on their backsides. Of course, that's the part of the trip that a junior-high kid like me would find interesting; they also did something or other with salt there....

Kathleen said...

I suppose a pre-pubescent boy reeking of old cheese is easier to contend with than the sub-zero temps in which you usually do these types of outings!!

CrossView said...

I think you should get some sort of merit badge for surviving! You're a better man than I am. Wait! I'm not a man....

I wonder if this will be one of those stories that will be fun to remember. In the future, of course. The far, far future??!!