I’ve been a Girlguiding leader since 2007 and I was a Young Leader and a Guide, Brownie and Rainbow before that. I’ve been involved since I was five years old and now I’m a qualified Brownie, Guide & Ranger leader, a county leadership mentor, an archery instructor, fencing coach, paddlesport assistant, member of the Trefoil Guild and in March 2024, I’m starting as Division Commissioner so I have a lot of hats!
There’s a lot of great stuff about being a Girlguiding volunteer – community, teamwork, inspiring the girls and so on – but my favourite bit is that I get to have adventures and I get to introduce these kids to their first taste of adventure. I know my Rangers will still be talking about that time they went to winter camp when they’re my age. Some of the girls who visit the boathouse will go on to have a lifelong love of paddling. Maybe some of them will join an archery or fencing club on the strength of my taster session. And I’ve been on the receiving end of that. I take a tent and camp around Iceland and I know I wouldn’t do that if I hadn’t learned to camp when I was a Guide. Would I be on this kayaking leadership journey if we hadn’t done that one pool session when I was a Guide? How many adventures can I tick off as things I first tried because of Guides?
I post a fair bit about Girlguiding, mostly about the adventures and the camps because those are the bits that are relevant here to a travel/outdoors/adventure blog but to give you a few highlights from Girlguiding themselves: we help all girls know they can do anything. We open up a world of possibilities to girls from 4 to 18 – one where they can do anything. Rainbows welcomes all girls from 4 to 7 years old for play, learning and tons of fun in a colourful, safe space. Brownies welcomes all girls from 7 to 10 years old for nonstop fun, learning and adventure. Guides is a relaxed, welcoming space where you can have fun, learn and be yourself with good friends from 10 to 14 years old, and Rangers is your space – where you get together with other girls from 14 to 18 to have fun, learn more, give back, hang out, and just be you. We’re over 300,000 girls from 4 to 18 who come together to laugh, learn, explore and have adventures. We’re over 70,000 volunteers who make guiding happen by giving our time, talents, enthusiasm and
care for girls.
Over the Christmas break, I reorganised this blog a bit – added clickable maps to the travel stuff and made the adventures into a page rather than an endless warren of nested menus – and in the process, I discovered where I had blank spaces. Enough blank spaces to occupy a full quarter of the… More Switzerland 2014: A day in the Lauterbrunnen Valley
My ordinary church hall Brownies seem to have become Forest Brownies. I’m in an outdoorsy bushcraft wild state of mind and the plague is still ravaging, so Monday Evenings Indoors Brownies are (maybe temporarily) Forest Brownies now. Being a Brownie leader is stressful sometimes, especially when you only took on the Brown Owl job right… More Forest Brownies: campcraft & firelighting in the woods
Another year, another large-scale event missed. This time it’s Wellies & Wristbands 2021. I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not my favourite of Girlguiding’s flagship events because I find it’s just too much and it’s too busy and too noisy and mostly too expensive but I could fix all of that and make this… More Wellies & Wristbands 2021 (at home)
Happy International Women’s Day! I’ve not really acknowledged the day before. I’ve enjoyed Richard Herring’s annual “it’s November 19th” in response to thousands upon thousands of men whining “but when’s International Men’s Day??” (he’s now retired from doing it) and I’ve felt a quiet sort of pleasure in the fact that I’m a Girlguiding volunteer but… More Happy International Women’s Day!
I’ve done Sparkle & Ice every year since it began. There was muddy 2017, volunteering 2018, icy 2019 and stormy 2020 and now we’ve got at-home 2021. Just because Sparkle & Ice 2021 isn’t happening doesn’t mean I’m going to miss it. Last year, Girlguiding did an online version of Wellies & Wristbands because that’s… More Sparkle & Ice 2021: the at-home version
Back in 2015, Girlguiding South West entered a team into the Fastnet Face, a yacht race from the Isle of Wight to the lighthouse at Fastnet Rock and then back to Plymouth and to mark the event, they came up with the Fastnet Challenge badge. The Guides my Rangers are kind of twinned with did… More Keeping busy: the Fastnet Challenge badge
Sparkle & Ice, winter survival camp, is always interesting. We’ve had mud, rain, snow and now we were going to be camping in Storm Ciara. Girlguiding has four flagship national events. The first-tier ones are Wellies & Wristbands, their 4-day summer festival camp and their Guides-only stadium gigs. The second-tier ones are Magic & Mayhem,… More Sparkle & Ice 2020: camping in Storm Ciara
When I went to Pax Lodge for the Thinking Day weekend a few years ago – 2016? 2017? – I completed their challenge and the receptionist who signed it off said they’d never seen a challenge completed so thoroughly. I might do a blog post about it later in the year. It’s partly about Pax… More The Our Chalet Challenge
Thursday was our last full day. Really, it was our last day at all. We’d all be leaving fairly early on Friday morning, having accomplished nothing more than a quick breakfast and the last of our packing. We met at 9am at the flagpole with our hiking stuff because today we were going to the… More Our Chalet: walking to the woodcarver on Thursday
After our busy day on Tuesday and our late night, Wednesday started in a leisurely fashion. Instead of being summoned to breakfast at 8am by a bell, we had a casual drop-in brunch from 9.30. It had the usual breakfast items of toast and cereal but it also had two baskets of miniature croissants and… More Our Chalet: Lazy Wednesday