Kalahari Lock-In

The Girl and I are in a bit of a fog today. Last night (and this morning) we were at Kalahari Waterpark for a Girl Scout lock-in. 11 PM - 5 AM. By the time all of the girls were dressed and had gathered everything together, we finally got out of there around 5:30, which put us back in town at 6:30. Right to bed we went and got up around 1 PM today.

The Lock-In was an adventure but for all the wrong reasons. In the first half-hour we came across a little girl who had slipped down some steps leading up to one of the slides. Her friends weren't sure what happened. Some of them said she fainted, others said she tripped and hit her head. Her friends were guiding her down the steps when she got to myself and some other leaders. She was clinging to the rail taking the tiniest of steps and shaking all over. Her eyes were rolling in her head. And she was green. Literally green. I've never seen anything like it. She was a yellowish-green from head to toe. The other leader I was with grabbed the girl up and I started hollering down the stairs for everyone to move. Another leader shot off head to find a lifeguard. At the bottom of the stairs were two EMTs waiting to take the girl. We went to peek in on her a while later. They had her on oxygen, in neck brace, strapped to backboard and an ambulance was on the way.

A few hours later, I was in hanging around in the Girl Scout cabana when a little girl came over asking if this was first aid. Her big toe was bleeding under the nail. I offered to walk her to the first aid office and the whole way there her toe was oozing blood. We hobbled across the park and the lifeguards fixed her up. Then they gave her the news: She was going to lose the toe nail. The one guard showed the girl her own big toe with the nail only half grown back. The same ride had ripped her nail off a month earlier. That particular ride had a tendency to do that to people.

When I got back to the cabana I was told I missed all of the excitement. One of the leaders wiped up on the wet concrete and broke her ankle or maybe her leg.

Wow. It seems like a lot of disasters but there were 1,600 Girl Scouts there. I think I was just unlucky and kept coming across the bad moments.

Nevertheless, I had an amazing amount of fun and so did the girls in my troop. We all kept our toenails, kept our bones unbroken and stayed one color. I could write a whole post about what happened to myself and three other leaders on the one ride that looks like a giant toilet bowl, but I'm not quite ready to tell that story yet. It's a doozy!