Being both a keen Guide and a keener traveller, you’d think I’d be an INTOPS regular- that is, Girlguiding’s shorthand for International Opportunities, or trips abroad. But no, I’ve only in the last two years really come across INTOPS and I’d never thought about going for it myself. But now I have and this intersection of my interests seems absolutely perfect for my travel blog!
Two years ago, one of my Rangers and one of my fellow Brownie leaders both got selected. That was great and it brought INTOPS into my orbit but I still wasn’t thinking about going for it myself. It was last summer, when I was telling two of the Brownie leaders about my plan for my Eras Train Tour (London to Warsaw by train). They seemed quite impressed (“Isn’t it difficult to get the train in Poland?”) and one of them said “You’d be really good at INTOPS!”. I still didn’t think much of it – it’s not exactly a rare skill to be able to get on a train in another country – but then, a week after my big adventure from London to Berlin in a single day, I watched the region Team Interrail do exactly the same route. Well, after a couple of days in Berlin, I went on to four cities in Poland and they headed off to Czechia, Poland, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France (I think!) but the first day was the same, although they didn’t get caught up in French rail sabotage.
And so I started to go “… Well, maybe I do have the skills INTOPS want”.
I probably decided somewhere around September or October that I’d go for it this year but when it came to sending in my application, I still hesitated. Ordinary leaders like me don’t go on international trips. Ordinary leaders like me don’t get selected. International trips are for big leaders, special leaders, leaders with qualifications and experiences that I just don’t have. But I went for it.
This weekend was region selection. My application was accepted, thanks to a recommendation from my local commissioner and I found out last weekend that another leader from our division was going. On the one hand, that’s perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, when you’re fighting for your place, it’s hard to be rooting for yourself over someone you already know in person. The other 26 participants were strangers. I say 26 – two didn’t turn up, which means the other 24. No spoilers but we now know how many leaders are required to cover next year’s trips. Also for the sake of no spoilers, I’m going to try to be vague about the tasks if I can.
There will be four trips – one is ICE, International Community Experience, and that’s for the younger girls, the Guide-aged girls. Those trips are typically shorter, closer and cheaper. The other three are INTOPS and they’re for the Ranger/Young Leader age group, the 14-18s. The last two years those trips have been an international jamboree in the UK, an interrailing trip around Europe and a “wider world” trip. Actually, we know exactly where and when next year’s trips are but we’re under a vow of silence because the reveal was a big moment this weekend and it’s something everyone wants the girls to have as well on their selection weekend in July. I will say that I was already disinclined towards the wider world trip because it turns out I’m a chicken and I’d rather ease myself out of Europe under my own terms. I knew which trip I thought I fancied before I knew where the trips were and now I do know that, I’d be very happy with all three of the non-wider world ones.
We had five activities over the weekend. Well, over the Saturday, really. Sunday was reserved for packing up, seeing what’s involved in a region weekend and learning the locations. On arrival, we handed over a health form in a sealed envelope, in case of emergencies, and two photos and in return were given two namecards to be worn on two lanyards, one on the front and one on the back and frankly, we were all delighted to hand those back on Sunday. Wearing a lanyard backwards is a pain anyway and wearing the front ones had been a bit of a fire hazard a couple of times. Then we were sent off to our rooms to dump our luggage. While we waited for everyone to arrive so we could begin promptly at 9, we had an interview form to fill in – I’ll spare next year’s participants the simplicity of knowing what the questions are but suffice it to say that over nearly an hour, we sat at the table and struggled together, especially with “Aren’t questions 2 and 4 basically the same question??”.
At 9, we all gathered in the dining room for a welcome, the main feature of which was introductions from everyone in the room. Something on our kit list had been “2 items that tell us something about you” and I’d agonised over this for weeks. What do I want to tell the group about me? Who am I telling about me? Is it all participants? Is it going to be part of an interview? Do I want to tell them about me the person or me the potential INTOPS leader? Can I use my two items to influence which trip I seem a good fit for? In the end, I went for my book (I think I’ve deleted all the posts about it as I’ve taken it off sale but it’s a travelogue about my journey from Helsinki to Rovaniemi (via the train depot), adventures across the north of Europe, the rail replacement bus from Sweden to Norway, the ferry up to Tromso, my trip to Svalbard and finally over to Iceland, looking for the Northern Lights (and not seeing them as much as Northern Lights trips tell you you’ll see them!). I thought that advertised that I was an experienced traveller who had had adventures and a writer who could potentially document the trip, but at least was an experienced enough traveller to be writing books about travel. The second item was harder. Until Thursday night, I planned to take my neoprene socks to represent kayaking, watersports and swimming but then I had a panic that the 2026 trips might include a certain UK jamboree that my Guides are already planning to go to, so I veered sharply away from “I like adventurous activities” and opted for the European phrasebook I was given for Secret Santa once to signal that I’m the person in this room who does languages and that’s always useful when you’re travelling in countries that don’t speak English. Did it work? No idea.
We were split up into groups for our activities in Saturday, so that we could get to know each other and the international team could see how we got on with everybody. The first activity was a teamwork activity which required building something which needed to include some particular details. Most of them achieved what they were supposed to achieve but a couple didn’t quite do it on the first attempt (or second or even third) and ours was the biggest!
The second activity was to plan a trip. We had a budget to stick to and the budget guided us in what kind of adventure it was (there were items in the budget that made it very clear roughly what we were going to be doing, if you can be rough and clear at the same time) but we had to decide on the details, where we could shuffle the budget around and how to deal with various interruptions that were given to one representative from each group every ten or fifteen minutes, which included additional needs, safeguarding concerns and just general unexpected issues to be handled. After lunch and activity three, we had to present our adventure and our answers to the various problems to everyone else.
Lunch was a buffet, make your own roll etc and most of us returned to our little groups to continue planning, an hour not being anywhere near enough. Then we were shuffled again and sent outside for the campsite’s scavenger hunt, where the items we were finding were riddles to be answered. It got us outside, it got us exploring the campsite and each group had a member of the international team with us for a little semi-informal interview as we walked. Having spent a lot of time groaning over the responses to some of these questions in the morning, it at least saved us the “I have no idea what to say to that!” when we were subsequently asked the questions out loud, with the exception of “how much experience do you have with Rangers?” which hadn’t been on the form. I’ve done Rangers for nearly 18 years and I can prattle about how different mid-teenagers are from the likes of Brownies. One of the team commented on Sunday morning that the INTOPS trips are for the Ranger age group and we don’t have many people who have much experience with Rangers… so I guess that’s a good omen for me?
By the time we’d all had our chats and done our presentations, we were about an hour behind the programme. Everyone knows that a timetable on a camp or residential is just guidelines but we still had two activities to go and the only way to squeeze them in without sending us to bed at midnight was to cut the campfire, which was a bit of a disappointment. We also cut out half of our downtime and spent the other half queueing outside the campsite shop because we’re all Guide leaders and we desperately want a badge from the campsite! The international team, not initially realising this, arranged for the shop to be open for our group but no one confirmed it with them so after we’d waited patiently for 15 minutes, someone went to see what was going on and I’m pretty sure our shortened half-hour downtime got expanded back to an hour.
Activity four was a very simple one, where we had to plan an activity for a particular age group with limited time and materials. I don’t think there’s a Guide leader alive who can’t do that and doesn’t at least semi-regularly do that, especially since the new programme is all on cards. I produced a felt campfire from my car (could have got out the toy axe-throwing kit) and one of our group came up with a wellness activity that involved writing positive things about everyone and then we discovered that we weren’t just planning these activities, we were getting together with other groups and running those activities. So our group did our wellness activity around the campfire, another group did an indoor game and the third group did a wide game using What3Words (and inadvertently demonstrated why the likes of Mountain Rescue don’t like it – “is that an A or an O? Is that a plural? Is that a plural?”).
Activity five was dinner! We were divided into three groups and each group was going to cook a different dish, with a list of ingredients but no instructions. On Sunday, some of us discovered that these dishes were a big heavy hint to the three INTOPS destinations, which a few bright sparks (not including me!) had guessed on Saturday night. For that reason, I won’t tell you what we cooked but 26 people in the kitchen was too many and most dishes simply didn’t require 6-8 people to cook them, so a lot of people ended up back in the dining room making bracelets or learning the basics of pole-dancing and keeping out of the way, or so I understand. For a couple of groups, there was some prep that could be done in the dining room and by the time we needed to start cooking, most of the rest had moved out of the kitchen so our group moved in. There were some issues with dinner, mainly in that there were some ingredients missing and one group used the instructions, which also had some problems. There was the line that required 25 tablespoons of oil – this isn’t necessarily an error but when you get to that amount, surely you’d be measuring in millilitres? – and some people had different opinions on how to achieve the cooking to what the instructions told them to do. Then there was the issue of dietary requirements – for a while, it looked like no one was going to cook the dish my group ended up with because there was no group that didn’t contain at least one person that couldn’t eat it. Eventually we resolved the issue by putting all three dishes out school dinner-style and everyone just helped themselves to whatever they wanted, which resulted in some very mixed international dinners.
We pretty much cleaned up as we went along but catering for thirty people does result in a certain amount of large-scale cookware that needs to be washed afterwards, so some of us escaped to the kitchen to do that while everyone else queued for pudding. For plates and bowls, we had a little industrial dishwasher but you can’t put a cauldron-sized saucepan in the dishwasher, or a tray two-thirds the length of the enormous stainless-steel industrial oven so those had to be done by hand.
By the time everything was done, it was nearly 9pm. The international team left us to our own devices. If we wanted to go out and light a campfire, we could – provided we could find wood, a safe place and something to light it with. Someone had brought a firelighting kit as one of their two items so the latter was no problem. In the end, we didn’t have to light our own. We spied a massive fire in the woods, approached it in the hope of being sociable (and a bit lazy) and then ran away, realising it was a group of big gangly teenage boys presumably on a DofE expedition weekend. There’s a proper campfire circle with benches and a massive steel bowl for large group campfires but there are also smaller concrete circles all over the place and we found an abandoned fire left by a Scout group. It was small but it was still hot and all it took was a handful of dry twigs for it to flare up again. So we piled it with whatever handfuls of dry twigs we could find and stood around in our camp blankets singing together. That’s always one of my favourite things, a group of strangers from different places who somehow all know the same songs, even if they do have variations. One of the people wanted to know “the one about the bin man”, which is one of those borderline too-rude songs that I haven’t sung in probably two decades but can still remember most of. We took it in turns to sing verses of Oh You’ll Never Get to Heaven, we sang Campfire’s Burning as a round (I provided a third part on the third go round) and I also led a song I only learned last year at Glow, which is the “Jump, m’lady, jump!” song. Then we put out the found fire responsibly, because Guides are better than Scouts and we were on our way back to the house when we spied another massive fire in a different bit of woods. This was the Scout leaders – all the kids were tucked up in their tents and the leaders had put an actual chunk of tree on their concrete fire circle and the flames were getting up to eight or nine feet high and the heat could be felt ten feet away. It’s quite an amazing sight.
When we got home, people were drifting off to bed. I found someone to guard the door for me while I went out to finish my daily walking distance (she’d gone out to her car, got locked out and I’d let her in when she banged on the window, and she immediately volunteered to sit by the door in turn while I rushed out for five minutes) and then I went to bed.
Normally you get a room assigned but we were free to pick what we wanted. Eight people had come down on Friday night and had more or less picked a room each and the rest of us, arriving on Saturday, picked a room fairly randomly, as long as we wrote our names on the board by the door so the international team knew where we all were in the event of an emergency. The place was heated by a ground source pump and it was boiling in the rooms. We were also in bunk beds which squeaked and creaked. I’d opted for a four-person room but in the end, there were only two of us in there, so we both grabbed the bottom bunks and because we’re all grown-ups, no one screamed and ran around at all!
What I was expecting was for everyone to get up at 6 or 7 in the morning and make a bit of noise about that but at 7.30, when no one seemed to be particularly making a racket, I decided it was time to get up. We had until 9.30 to pack, empty our rooms, strip the beds, hoover the rooms, clean the bathrooms and have breakfast and two hours seemed a good amount of time for all that. I’d scattered all my belongings across the top bunk, I had a bedding roll to put back together, I knew it would take at least two trips back to the car to carry everything (I’d given up on forcing my waterproofs back into my backpack) and we only had a hoover or two between the 28 of us. In the end, though, we were all gathered in the dining room, with the tables cleaned and packed away in the conservatory where we’d done most of our activities and eaten our meals, by five past nine.
Sunday was a quick tour of the 2024 and 2025 region trips to give us an idea of what INTOPS could look like, a rundown of the responsibilities involved in a region trip, what support the region office offers and then the big reveal, the 2026 destinations. Secret! If I get selected, I’ll update this in the summer when the girls know. If I don’t, this will probably stay like this forever. We handed back our lanyards in exchange for a region INTOPS badge, which was something else I’d been hoping for – I know my Ranger who did this two years ago got a county INTOPS badge but I couldn’t remember if region did them too.
The last activity was another form, with one particularly difficult question on page 2, plus something we’d been wondering about all weekend – how much say do we get in what trips we go on? Well, page 2, list the four trips in order of preference! I knew which was my number 4 (that would be the wider world trip and I’d known that from the start) and the ICE trip went in at number 3 but it was impossible to pick between the other two, both of which got an “Oooh, I want that one!” from me when they appeared on the presentation. We did a lot of gossiping – what have you put for question 2, what have you put for that horrible question, what trips have you put? – and even so, even after we’d all stood around not quite ready to leave but with nothing left to do, it was only just after 11am, which is the official end time for the weekend.
I’d love to tell you the outcome – that I got selected to help run a trip! – but I don’t know. We know how many leaders are required for the 2026 trips so we know how many of us are going to get a no but we won’t know who until we get an email and a letter in the post, which could be up to three weeks away. There were no obvious candidates who were definitely going to be among the nos, a couple of people who are almost definitely going to be among the yeses and for the rest of us, it’s probably going to come down to pure luck. On the one hand, I’ve got the Ranger experience and the languages working in my favour but on the other hand, there are definitely candidates with better qualifications who probably made a bigger or better impression.
There were several youngsters who’d recently done GOLD (Guiding Overseas Linked to Development; INTOPS but with more voluntourism and less of a jolly) who seemed a shoe-in – whatever INTOPS wanted was probably pretty similar to what GOLD had wanted and there was very little point trying to compete with them. I was three-quarters of the way home before I realised that suitability as a participant is very different from suitability as a leader and organiser and they’re not necessarily any more likely than anyone else to get one of these places so we’re back down pure luck.
I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not going to get it so I’m resigned and not disappointed when the email or letter comes but that little flicker of hope is still in there and I know that whatever mind games I play with myself over the next few weeks, I’m still going to be disappointed. There’s always next year. Theoretically, by next year’s selection weekend, I should have a better idea of how to play the game and where to spot the clues but next year’s weekend might be totally different and my county commissioner might decide not to pay for someone who’s already been rejected once. So I’m going to concentrate on my trip to Croatia tomorrow and by the time I get back, maybe I’ll have forgotten all about INTOPS.
I Am A Polar Bear 