So, I had an amazing weekend!!! I left Thursday morning around 8:30am and went to Kansas City for Camp Fire USA's National Leadership Conference and Youth Summit! The hotel we stayed at was soo swanky! I think on my list of nice hotels I've stayed in, it's #2. I went with a bunch of women from my Camp Fire council and my bestie, Hope!* Since it was only Kansas City, we drove. I met a lot of people who flew in because it's a national conference, so there are a lot of different councils represented from all over the country!!! We got there Thursday, late afternoon, so we had time to check out our surroundings!! Oh, and my friend Sparky was there too, she's just a firecracker of fun! We dropped our stuff in our(supah nice) rooms and went shopping nearby. One of the women really wanted to go to this one shoe store, so we went. And very quickly got bored because she wanted to spend HOURS in there. And it wasn't even THAT great of a shoe store lol. So most of the adults went back to the hotel. Sparky, Hope and I went down the street to check out a halloween costume shop, and the one woman stayed at the shoe store. There were so many fun wigs! I tried on a lot of them, but my favorite was the giant afro wig. I wish you could've seen me, it was so funny!
After we finished window shopping, we walked back to the hotel to get ready for our first dinner. Everything was so fancy, so we all dressed really nicely. I'm so glad I took Swan's(our chaperone) advice and only brought one pair of jeans for casual. Our first dinner was spectacular! I don't remember what the food was, but it was delicious! And every single meal the whole weekend was 4 stars! Like, waiters and three forks and three courses and two wine glasses. Our first speaker was Joseph Michelli. He wrote this book that I'm DYING to read, it's called The Starbucks Experience. Anyways, the whole speech was very engaging, and I didn't get bored one time! After everything was finished, before Hope and I went to our next workshop, I went up to him to shake his hand and tell him how much I enjoyed the speech. He told me I had amazing poise for my age to be able to walk up to a stranger and compliment them. It was awesome!
The first youth workshop was pretty much icebreakers to start getting to know the other youth. We played this game with skittles! So, you pass the skittles around and tell everyone to take as many as they want. After everyone has them, you reveal that for every skittle they have, they have to say an interesting fact about themselves, putting a skittle in their mouth for every fact, without shewing until they finish! Now, I've played this game before but with toilet paper. So I knew to only take a few skittles LOL!!! But other people had at least 50!!! It was hilarious! Some people were getting ulcers in their cheeks because the skittles were just eating away at them!
So the first night was pretty great, getting to meet everyone. I also got to talk to Elizabeth Darling, the new chair of the board of national trustees for CFUSA. She was pretty cool, because at first, you just see this sweet looking older woman. Then she starts telling you how she enjoys scuba and skydiving in her spare time!!! Friday we spent doing workshops and hearing keynote speakers. My favorite workshop on Friday was probably Finding Your Voice. We had a guest who came and talked to us about what your voice is and how to use it to your own effect. My friend Sparky was actually helping to lead this one, and she was AH-MAZING!! One thing from that class that really stood out to me, was this "Passion X Message=Voice".
Its really just been stuck in my head. We did two other things that day too, we learned about and wrote Elevator Speeches and we came up with practice action plans. See, Elevator Speeches are ironic to me now, but I'll get back to that later ;-). So, an elevator speech is a very short and concise speech you can give to someone you just met in an elevator. It should have all they key points including how to get involved and some of your own personal experience. We each got about 10 minutes to write a speech, then we did speed speeching! Which is similar to speed dating, but with speeches. We had one minute to read our speech to the person in front of us, then the other person had 20 seconds to give feedback before we rotated and did it agian adding the other persons feedback into our speech as we go. It was pretty cool.
Then the practice action plans were to get ready for the youth summit on Saturday. My group made a plan on how to prevent domestic child abuse. It wasn't fail-proof, but it was definitely a good start. And I don't mean to brag, but ours was the most thought out and we had the most information.
Friday night we had off, so our whole council went out on the town! We had 7:30 dinner reservations at this tuscany place in the KC Plaza called Brio's, so we left the hotel around 5:45 to have the valet park the car and go shopping for awhile before dinner! We went to the Betsey Johnson store, Northface, Eddy Baur, Hallmark, and Hope and my favorite, FOREVER 21!!!!! There was a huge Forever 21 down the street from a store that the rest of the women wanted to go in, so we begged our chaperone to let us go by ourselves....and she did! It was amazing! I got three cardigans and a long sleeve shirt to wear under them...for $16.00! So many deals, so little time! Everybody laughed when we came back and I had this huge bag while they had their little bitty Hallmark bags! Dinner was sooo delicious! Our executive director, who is so sweet, bought Hope's and my dinner! I didn't know that she was personally paying for it until we'd already gotten home. I thought the council was paying for it! If I'd known, I would have payed for it myself. Now, Hope is a really picky eater. And she's really small. So she was searching the menu for something to eat. finally, she saw "roast chicken $15.00" so she ordered that. The rest of us got some form of pasta. So finally, the waiters start bringing out our food and we all have our regular sized pasta plates and they carry over this HUGE platter for Hope. It's a whole chicken. The whole roasted chicken. It was so hilarious, the rest of us could not stop laughing!!! I think she got through maybe a fourth of it by the time the rest of us were done and she was full!!
So we go back to the hotel and decided to check out the pool. The brochure said it was heated and it has a jacuzzi! So we get down there and make the (bad) decision to try out the jacuzzi first, which was delightful. But after we finish the jacuzzi, the pool which felt so warm 25 minutes ago, is now freezing cold because the jacuzzi was so warm. So we went back to the room to grab our money to hunt down some snacks. I had the brilliant idea to knock on some girls from the conference's door a little ways down the hall. So they all decide to come with us. By now, Hope is on the phone with her mom telling her about all the fun we've had so far. So I told Hope to take the first elevator, and we'd all take the next one. So she could stay on the phone and not have to listen to us all chattering all the way down. (Here's the ironic part) So our elevator comes, and two more girls from the conference are on it, about to go check out the pool! So, we started on the 9th floor and had buttons pushed for the 5th floor, pool deck, and the lobby, snacks! Around the 5th floor, it sounds like there is a ton of pebbles falling on the elevator, it stops, and on the inside it says we're on the lobby floor. Obviously something went wrong, so we start leaning on the alarm button. Because the doors won't open. So in case you were wondering, it's me, the two girls who were already on the elevator, the three girls from the room down the hall, and their chaperone. So thankfully, I'm not the adult in the situation. The chaperone used the phone to call the elevator operator people, you know, the emergency phones in any elevator you've ever ridden in. Between all 7 girls in this elevator, there were two cell phones!!! It was amazing how bad our luck was. I used one of them to call my mom and give her the chaperones phone number and ask her to call Swan and tell her so that my council would know that I was stuck in an elevator!! The worst part was when they told us that if what they were trying next didn't work, they were going to turn off the power and drop us. Now there are two things to note here. 1: The inside of the elevator says we're on the lobby floor, so we're a little confused as to where they're dropping us, exactly. 2: I'm not a religious person, but right then I took hands with everyone else, bowed my head and prayed with everyone else. I haven't quite figured out what that means yet. Luckily, what they were trying DID work and there was a terrifying moment when the doors shuddered open for a couple seconds and closed again, but I still saw the signs outside the elevator saying we were on the 5th floor, NOT the lobby. Then a couple minutes later, the doors opened and looked like they would be stay open long enough for us to get out. I might mention that I was still in my bathing suit from swimming with Hope. The whole time. I was so cold. This all took about ninety minutes. Now, I'm the kind of person who can hang onto the shreds of composure until AFTER the event is over. So as soon as I got out, I started crying so hard. Then I walked up four flights of stairs to get dressed, then walked down four and had to take another elevator to the lobby so we could go over the accident/incident report. Of course the hotel management was in a tizzy over all of us, so a couple of the girls got blankets and I asked for some orange juice because I was shaky and dizzy and still very shook up. But the hotel guy never came back with it. So after we finished talking about it, we went out in the lobby to wait, and finally Lucy, one of the women from my council(I love her, she's pretty awesome) decided we were done waiting, so she went into the bar in the lobby and demanded some orange juice. It was decidedly cool. So I got my orange juice and finally felt steady enough to walk back up stairs. They left Hope and I there, and we went about getting ready for a long due bedtime (it's around 12:30). So I went to take my shower, but I was still feeling nauseous. Of course, I couldn't keep my OJ down, because I went into shock. I'm a trained lifeguard, so I know what shock looks like, and I knew that was what it was, my body just couldn't handle allllll that stress. But I called Swan anyway to let her know, and she and Lucy brought me some saltines and green tea and sprite to help me sleep. Eventually, it was the green tea that did the trick.
Of course, the elevator girls were the talk of breakfast. Luckily it was the day of the summit, so it didn't last long! The summit was actually pretty exciting! we had our 30 or so Camp Fire youth and then over 150 KC youth form different organizations came for the day. We all sat through the opening remarks by several different important people including CEO of CFUSA, Kathy Tisdale and KC Interim Superintendent. And there were several KC Councilmen there to watch and learn. After breakfast and the first few speeches announcing who all was represented at the summit, we split up into our breakout sessions. Mine was about peer mentoring. So all these different groups were attacking the problem of not enough youth going on to post-secondary education. Or even worse, not even completing their secondary school. And we were all looking at it from a different angle. My classes angle was how to get the youth excited for post-secondary education. Tyler and I (we're both CFUSA youth reps, and he's from D.C.) were paired with these two teens from the boys and girls club in the KC area. It was probably because we intimidated them with our excitement, but they didn't really contribute much to our brainstorming. But oh well, Tyler and I worked well together. After our breakout sessions, we went down to lunch and there was a DJ and everything! Pretty cool if you ask me!! He played the Cupid Shuffle, and easily 40 youth went up to the front and started doing it! After lunch, we split up into groups based on our organization. Since CFUSA had so many youth, w split even further into our own councils. So Hope, Sparky, Swan, and I came up with a pretty good action plan that would work in our council. I was "volun-told" to present it to EVERYONE there. So I got the opportunity to stand up in front of A BOATLOAD of strangers and talk about my idea's. It was awesome and terrifying at the same time! Afterwards, everyone told me I did a fantastic job, so it can't have too terrible.
We had an hours break after the summit finished up so me, Hope, Tyler, And Jason(Tyler's chaperone) decided to walk to the National World War One Memorial! We didn't have a ton of time, so we only walked to the bottom of the top....which had to have been five staircases at LEAST. But it was still pretty fun. The view was fantastic from where we were! We even got a picture of the three youth planking KC!! My first planking picture!! I admit, I kind of liked Tyler, so that just made everything more exciting lol! Anyways, CF is very "no purpling" so nothing happened.
After we walked back, it was time for our last dinner! Everyone was dressed to the sevens(I would say nines, but it wasn't THAT fancy). I guess the coolest part of that dinner was that the president of the NWBA was our speaker. And I got to shake her hand. And at the very end, they played Edge Of Glory as our theme song, and even the CEO of CFUSA was dancing!!
Then we had thirty minutes to change into something more comfortable before the youth "party". I still feel like we got conned into a service project... First they lured us in by putting party on the schedule and then getting us an ice cream bar. Then they trapped us with, and I quote, "An hours worth of reflection". So we did that, and then our "party" was the service project. We chopped up Wal-Mart bags to send to a church in KC who will crochet them together and make waterproof pads and blankets for the homeless. Which is cool I suppose, if you aren't expecting a party. We had to leave the next morning, so nothing really exciting happened between KC and home. Not that I really wanted anything too happen....I have had enough excitement for one week!
But this Thursday I have a Halloween book club party where we'll be discussing Poe(what else??), and then a Hitchcock marathon party at my friend Mark's House, then Saturday through Sunday evening, I'm helping out with an event at Wagamoo!
*For the people who actually know me, all names are changed, so hopefully you can figure out who you are! If not, FB me and I'll tell you lol. I have a piece of paper with all the pseudonyms on it so I don't get mixed up!
