Jr High Field Trip

Yesterday I accompanied Becca's junior high school on a field trip. I had never gone on a field trip with anyone older than elementary kids, and I wasn't so sure I would like it -- mostly because of teenagers trying to be cool instead of enjoying things. However, it ended up being more fun than I anticipated ...

Anyway, we started by visiting a Krishna Temple that is here in town. They have a lot of animals on their property, so the kids loved that. They all got a kick out of the peacocks and thought they were great:


I wasn't quite so excited as I had neighbors growing up who had them, and they are noisy birds. :) They also had fish that came when you clapped. That was cool -- trained fish!

Of course, the favorite of most of the kids were the llamas. They have a bunch of them there, and they had the kids just take the reigns and bring them out of their pens. Becca started leading one out (which she was scared to do anyway), and then it sneezed on her. That was the end of her llama fascination. :) I did convince her to hold the reigns one more time so I could get this picture:


It was actually interesting to note, though, because the llama was nice and calm before she took the reigns, and when she went to take them it perked up its ears and started backing away. I didn't realize animals could sense fear THAT easily!

Anyway, they let the kids lead the llamas around, including up the steps of the temple (to show what good pack animals they are on steep inclines). They also had the kids go to the bottom of a hill and race up it with the llamas. I got some great shots of some of Becca's friends since she was done with llamas quite a while before the races.


Going to the temple was a nice cultural education for many of these kids who live mostly around people of the same faith. I thought they asked good questions. When we learned about their belief of reincarnation, I started to wonder how Krishnas ever eat since they are so worried about karma and not eating anything that was/is alive. He said that plants are okay, even though you can be reincarnated to be a plant if you didn't fulfill your human obligations. I don't think I'd ever want to eat if I thought of things that way! He also said that rain is little demigods being allowed to come back to the earth to become wheat, etc. and re-enter the cycle. Made me a little uncomfortable to think of that when it sprinkled later in the day and a bunch of demigods were missing the grass and instead ending that round of reincarnation on my shirt instead ...

Anyway, it is a beautiful building:


We ran out of time to do yoga, but they sang/changed to us instead:


I guess the instrument he's playing is a mix between an accordion and a harmonica. It was interesting -- I've never seen one of those before.

Then we were off to one of the local sports parks to do some geocaching. There are some public ones at the park, but one of the kids at the school had created one as well, and we did his. Each clue (A, B, C, D, & E) had a question and two answers with coordinates. (For example, how many people get married in Las Vegas every day? If it's more than 125, go to this location; if it's less than 125, go to this location.) We had two GPS units, so we entered both answers (since we didn't know any of them) and went to the closest one.

It was really fun to try to figure them out. Then when we found the small silver capsules, they had a clue as well. "There are how many supreme court justices?" When you thought of the answer you plugged it in to the final location at the bottom of the page. Once you had them all you could go to the final location and get the prize.

Here is Becca trying to figure out which way to go:


And here she is finding one of the capsules:


Her group found all but two, which was more than any other group .... and I barely even helped. :) Some of the groups couldn't find one right off, so they gave up and just sat down. Funny thing is that we went to the table where they were sitting and found one right underneath one of the girls! When we said we thought it was at their table they said we were nuts and that they'd looked for it everywhere. We started looking and found it pretty easily. It was funny.

Anyway, that was MY last field trip of the year. I actually rode on the school bus with them, and it made me think back to my bus days -- UGH!!! (Notice it's in caps? It really was that bad! :) I realized I hadn't been on a bus in something like 18 or 19 years, and that the bus I rode the ENTIRE time was 76-C. Yes, a bus built in 1976 transported me to school into the 90s. Crazy to think how old it was ... maybe that's why my bus driver was always so cranky! ;)