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Blog Entry 30 of 31 Musings, Ramblings and Scout Stuff

This blog is generally about what is piquing my interest at the moment which will probably be Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, or politics.

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Girl Scouts go on bicycling adventure weekend

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Contributed by: Joshua Godinez on 5/5/2008

On May 3 and 4, Girl Scout Troop 1328 from Mission Hills did our bicycling adventure weekend.

Now that the girls are 12 and 13, they are able to take on more challenging tasks. So, they loaded up the heavy boxes and bicycles for our adventure all the way out to the dangerous outskirts of Calabassas.

The starting point for our bike ride was essentially the crossroads of the Ventura Freeway and Valley Cirlcle Boulevard.

Valley Circle is a nice, wide road without too much traffic and a marked bicycle lane. After the girls had a few minutes to cycle around on a side street to warm up, we headed off north.

Dawn, one of the troops leaders, set the pace in the front while I stayed in the back with a whistle to signal if the group should stop. We made it about a mile and a half before we stopped at a gas station for a pit stop.

Thereafter, the girls went up and down a few hills that seem very easy when you're in a car and take on a whole different look when you're on a bicycle.

After a few miles Valley Circle turns to the east and becomes narrow right after Roscoe. Here the adventure really started because we had to trust that the cars would go around us.

The road continues across the north end of the old Rocketdyne and Boeing research areas so there aren't very many houses or much of anything else.

Eventually, the road turns into Plummer and you get to Topanga Canyon Boulevard. There, we turned around and retraced our route until we got to Woolsey Canyon and took that up into the hills.

Well, for a few feet only. The road is marked private and no bicycles are allowed past a certain point. That's where we loaded the bikes back into the trailer and road the remaining two or three miles to camp.

The girls biked 13 miles, according to Google. Some of them thought they couldn't do it, but all eventually made it. I thought they might not want to bike again for a long time, but they're already talking about doing another trip.

We camped at Sage Ranch Park on Box Canyon. They only rent to organized groups like the Girl Scouts. We had much more space than we needed, but it was nice to be technically still in the valley (kinda) and yet have a campground that felt so isolated (if you ignored all the airplanes).

The girls worked on whittling and lashing after setting up camp. The campground has a little ampitheater so the girls entertained each other with songs and jokes after the sun went down.

It was surprisingly cold in the morning and it took a bit of doing to get them out of their warm sleeping bags.

We did a simple Sunday service, looked out over Simi Valley, and then returned home. It was an adventure that many of them are eager to repeat.

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