Monthly Archives: February 2017

Guides Trip to Victoria

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Last weekend the 22nd Guides took a trip to Victoria, BC to see the sites, have fun, and experience a great Guiding adventure.

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These girls have been planning this trip for about a year and have done extra fundraising and lots of planning sessions to make it the best trip it could be. Clearly their hard work paid off because they had a blast!

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The trip started with a Friday morning bus ride from Pacific Central Station to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. Once they made it to the island they found their way to South Vancouver Island Guide House, a Girl Guide property, which was their home base for the weekend.

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Then it was time for exploration! Over the next couple of days the Guides explored the city. From attractions like miniature world, to shopping at the famous Munro’s Bookstore, to the Royal BC provincial museum, and beyond!

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One of the highlights of the trip was the tour of the BC legislature. A very knowledgeable tour guide informed the group about the role of the Legislative Assembly and MLAs and the history of both the province of British Columbia and of the Parliament Buildings. They even got to visit part of the building not normally accessible to the public! The tour guide gave them lots of cool tidbits of information and was even happy to take this commemorative photo of the girls inside.

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Meals on the trip included a supper at the Old Spaghetti Factory plus a chance to go grocery shopping at a local store for food they could make back at the Guide House.

Visiting all the awesome sites like Chinatown, the waterfront, and monuments, and staying out late into the evening made the group hungry!

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By the time they got home on Sunday afternoon the group was exhausted. But everyone had lots of fun, making Guiding memories to last a lifetime.

Guides Look to the Stars

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Earlier this month, for one of their regular weekly meetings the girls from our 56th Burnaby Mountain Guides went on an outing to the Trottier Observatory at Simon Fraser University.

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This was a great opportunity to see some first rate astronomy equipment and learn all about the stars from a very knowledgeable tour guide. The observatory features a six-meter-diameter dome housing a 0.7-metre diameter reflector telescope that is capable of tracking distant galaxies billions of years old. Unfortunately, the girls were not able to look through the telescope due to cloud cover and high chance of rain — the very fancy telescope cannot get wet.

One highlight of the tour was when they got to press the button to turn the closed dome around – it was very cool! The tour guide showed them many images on the monitor that had been captured using the telescope – stars, planets, galaxies, nebulas. Some of these images captured by the telescope can be viewed on the observatory’s website, here.

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Other awesome things to enjoy at the observatory include the beautiful outdoor light displays of seasonal sky maps and the ROYGBIV light spectrum. The Guides were really interested in this event and had non-stop questions. Everyone learned a lot! It was an excellent hands-on STEM activity that tied directly into Guide program.

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Burnaby Mountain District is very lucky to have this world class university right on our doorstep. Many of our leaders are SFU students or alumni and are keen to share these opportunities with the girls. SFU also holds star parties that are open to the public — the Guides highly recommend this activity to anyone interested in learning more about the night sky. Check out the observatory website for more info.

Gymnastics Sleepover

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This past fall the 54th Burnaby Mountain Brownies had a great time at one of our fave local sleepover spots — Club Aviva Gymnastics in Coquitlam!

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Many of our units have had sleepovers at this location, and every year Guiders report that girls had a great time. It is always so awesome to see girls having fun in an active environment. Healthy living is a blast when you’ve got trampolines, high ropes, and foam pits at your disposal!

Whether they’re brand new to gymnastics or have used this equipment before, it doesn’t matter — girls have a great time exploring the fun things they can do. The helpful staff keep girls safe and give them great tips too.

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And to top it all off, the event is made into a slumber party with all their Brownie friends. Girls get to sleep in gyms, exhausted after an evening of active play. Thanks, Club Aviva, for hosting us again. I’m sure we’ll be back soon!