Well, I did it! I helped to chaperone a middle school overnight field trip. This is SO far out of my comfort zone, but I am SO glad that I did it, and I am already looking forward to volunteering myself for next year’s trip!
Marmon Valley is a horse ranch/camp about 1.5 hours away from our school, near Columbus, Ohio. They have rustic cabins, a dining hall, over 150 acres of land, a herd of over 100 horses, a dance hall, and a little store. Every year, the 5-8th grade students from our school spend an overnight at Marmon Valley and it is a HIGHLIGHT of the year for them! Even though the trip was just about 24 hours long, we packed in so much fun and so many memories!!
Here is a little recap:
We arrived around 5pm after leaving straight from school. We got checked in, got our activities folder and then went to find my cabin. I think I was the last person to arrive, so I got the last bunk in the house. It was ok, though, because I got to bunk with four other chaperones, and we had about 18 6th grade girls in our cabin with us!
I actually cannot stand sleeping on the top bunk, so I moved my mattress to the floor, which made for much more comfortable sleep for me! Unfortunately, it meant that I was the chaperone closest to the door, but more on that in a minute…
After getting settled into our bunks, we headed over to the dining hall and were served a great dinner of fried chicken and potatoes, followed by dessert!
After dinner, we split into two big groups. Our group got to go on the hayride first, and then we switched for a bit of barn/line dancing! The weather was absolutely GLORIOUS.
Our hay ride ended and we headed up to the barn for line dancing! Man, do I have two left feet, but it was a lot of fun!
After the dancing and hayrides, the whole group of kids headed to the campfire. We had skits, worship and a time of stories around the fire. It was a lot of work keeping 120 middle schoolers engaged, but we managed to do it!
The bonfire time ended around 10, and the kids were allowed to fellowship by the fire, or head back to the cabins for showers and bed. Lights out/quiet hours began at 11:30. Since our cabin was the 6th grade girls, they did a pretty great job of getting showers and settling down. We really did turn the lights out by 11:30, and most of our cabin was asleep by midnight! I heard that was NOT the case in some of the older cabins haha!
While the sleeping arrangements weren’t luxurious, I actually felt pretty comfortable. But, the night was a bit rough since I got woken up multiple times to escort girls to the bathroom! While the bathrooms were inside a building (not an outhouse), there weren’t any inside OUR building, so it was a whole get-up-out-of-bed-and-escort-them-across-the-clearing-to-the-bathroom. Phew, I was exhausted by the time our alarms went off at 7!
We had to be up, at the barn porch, and with all of our stuff cleared out of our cabins by 8am. Chelsea took an opportunity to do her makeup in the car mirror haha.
From there, we hopped on the wagons to head out to the woods for a “chuck wagon breakfast”- scrambled eggs and potatoes cooked over a fire.
From there, the day was split into one hour increments. We started off with an hour block of free time- the girls played in the animal barn, visited the camp store and generally wandered around.
Then we were off to the challenge course!
This was one of my favorite parts of the day! The kids were split into two groups and taken around to different challenges. They had to work as a team to solve the challenge. One of our groups had a clear leader and the whole group worked so well together with minimum frustration. The other group did not work together well at all, and had several kids who solved the problem but nobody listened to them. It was FASCINATING to watch.
We headed up from the challenge course and went to devotions. This was led by a staff member/Mom and was great because she really involved the kids in acting out the story and getting into it!
After the devotions, we headed to lunch and we could just see these sweet kids getting sooo tired. After lunch we headed to a craft and got waters filled, visited the bathrooms, etc. After everyone departed from the craft area, I walked around and collected all the sweatshirts and water bottles left behind. Tell me you are chaperoning a middle school field trip without telling me…
We rallied for our next activity- a service project! Some of the kids went off to clean cabins, but our crew was taken out to a big field and we worked on splitting and stacking wood. This was a HARD job- it was HOT, and the logs were really big. A lot of the kids worked their hearts out, and then some of the kids complained nonstop the whole time.
We headed back to the campgrounds and took a quick rest break- the kids were really hot and tired by that point! Up next we had a relay race- and it was epic! It involved several different stations- blowing up a balloon, doing a 50 piece puzzle, playing the Price is Right, doing a ping-pong game, a skittle race, a memory game and a cup stacking challenge. It was girls vs. boys and neck and neck the whole time!
After our relay race, we had a quick 15 minute break before we headed off to our last activity of the day- a horseback ride! We had heard from other groups that the prep for the ride was about an hour, and the actual ride was a little over an hour. We knew that parents were going to start arriving to pick up kids within an hour, so we needed to get on those horses and get going!
Theo ended up asking our guide to make it a shorter ride, and I think that was a good call! We rode for 30 minutes and my hips were feeling it!
We arrived back from our horse ride, grabbed our things and headed out! We needed to go pick up the boys from my parents house, get dinner and get home. We got home right around 8pm, and quite literally fell into bed.
It was such a privilege and delight to be on this trip! I absolutely love that Tera wanted me to go, and that I get to be a part of our school in this way. The 6th graders on this trip were my first group of 1st graders, and I also taught many of the 5th graders! It’s so fun watching them all grow up. Middle schoolers still have a lot of growing up to do, but it is absolutely amazing to watch them start to find who God has made them to be, and how they are going to find their place in the world.
When we got home, Theo and I wrote out all of the upcoming years that we will have a kiddo in the Marmon Valley age group: and it’s 11 years. For the next 11 consecutive years, we will have at least one kid in the Marmon Valley age group. Buckle up, here we go! Hahaha.
