Trail Talk – 10/13/25

Happy Middle of October! How in the world is it the middle of October already?! Crazy! I hope you all had a great weekend this last weekend. I have to tell all of you something. It has been really hard missing scouts the last few weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I love that my kids are involved in sports and other activities, and I love going to their activities. I love to be down on the swim deck helping as a backup timer when Rebekah is swimming and I love yelling very loudly getting the crowd riled up at Rachel’s volleyball games. I think she is embarrassed by me at times! However, it is hard to miss these weekly scout meetings. I hope to be back soon!

With the above being said, I will not be at this week’s meeting. My daughters have a volleyball meet and a swim meet back-to-back. I apologize for this! I hope to be back soon! If you have any questions about anything, please talk to Christy and Sherry! You can also feel free to text or email me!

PLEASE PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW CONCERNING THE OCTOBER CAMPOUT FOR THIS WEEKEND!

IMPORTANT NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR THIS WEEK:

October Campout – October 17 – 19th AND THE ABSOLUTE LAST DAY TO SIGN UP FOR THIS CAMPOUT IS THIS TUESDAY NIGHT! We will not be taking any “latecomers” for this campout. We will be buying tickets for Gull Meadow Farms early on Wednesday and we must have accurate numbers for that. If you want to go on this campout and you don’t sign up by the end of the troop meeting on Tuesday, unfortunately, you are out of luck. Sorry. In fact, we will be shutting down the link for the campout on Zeffy as well so you can’t sign up via Zeffy at the last minute either. If you want to go to the campout, that is great! We would love to have you! We will be camping at Fort Custer Recreation Area and going to Gull Meadow Farms during the day on Saturday. We just need to know if you are coming or not and we need to know no later than Tuesday night! Thank you for your understanding. The cost of the campout is $60, and it covers the campout fees and entrance to Gull Meadow Farms. However, if you plan to buy cider, donuts, apples or anything at their store, YOU NEED TO BRING YOUR OWN MONEY!  SIGN UP THIS TUESDAY FOR THE CAMPOUT. TURN IN THE ATTACHED PERMISSION  SLIP AND PAY THE $60 TO SHERRY! THANK YOU! Do you all see how much I am stressing that Tuesday night is the last night to sign up for this? Gee, I wonder if that is important! 😊

Registration –  It is that time of year again! As you may or may not know, when you sign up for scouts and you “register” you fill out an application, and you pay a fee. Your registration is good for 1 year. At the end of that 1 year, you have to “reregister”. Thankfully, it does not involve filling out another application. Since you are in the system, we can just reregister you right in the system. However, it does involve paying a fee for the next year of scouting. The fee for the next year of scouting amounts to $210 per scout and $100 per adult. The breakdown is like this $85 National Fee, $85 Michigan Crossroads Council Fee, and $40 Troop fee. The $40 troop fee goes to pay for things like all the 400+ awards that were handed out at the last court of honor, and it also goes for things like equipment, fees and if possible, to help reduce the cost of some of the campouts.

The way that we want this to happen is for you to pay the entire $210 per scout or $100 per adult to the troop and we will in turn pay the council and national fees. Scouting has it setup so that you can pay those fees directly, but it is a HUGE hassle, and it is much easier for the troop to do it directly. We must have all of the scouts reregistered by no later than Dec. 31st of this year. The troop itself “recharters” at this same time and we need to have an accurate accounting of all the scouts when we do that.

If you intend to re-register your scout for another year of scouting, please start paying your registration fee to Sherry or on Zeffy. You will pay $210 if you are reregistering a scout and $100 if you are an adult registering or re-registering.

Please keep in mind that for scouts or adults to attend activities that have to be registered paying members of Scouting America. We are not allowed to have scouts attend activities if they are not a registered paying member of the organization.

Every year we have to hassle people about paying the registration fees and we would rather not do that. It is tiresome for us. Please take care of this matter as soon as possible!

November Campout – We have a campout coming up this weekend but then we have another campout coming up 3 weeks after this one! The November campout this year is Nov. 7 – 9th and will be at Camp Tamarack(Woods Lake Scout Reservation). We will be camping there with Troop 287, and we WILL HAVE CABINS! Each boy troop will have their own cabin, and the girl troops will be sharing a cabin. Our Senior Patrol Leaders plan to come up with some fun things for us to do as a troop and for us to do with Troop 287. This is the Portage Scouting Campout! The cost for this campout is $45, and the permission slip is attached. You can pay this to Sherry and turn in the permission slip starting either tomorrow night or next Tuesday! The permission slip is attached.

SwampBase Participants – SWAMPBASE MEETING TUESDAY OCTOBER 21ST AT 6:00 PM, prior to the regular troop meeting. Mike King hopes to get things rolling and impart some information to the group going on this trip. Please plan to attend this very important meeting next Tuesday at 6:00. Please keep making those monthly payments so that we can make sure to pay SwampBase in a timely manner!  From this point on, payments will be made in increments of $160 per month through February.

SERVICE OPPORTUNITY! At Pathfinder Church! In October we will be filling Blessing Bags for Midwest Mission. The bags have rice, soy, dehydrated vegetables and a vitamin packet. One bag will feed hungry people, and they are sent all over the world. We will be setting up assembly lines with 10 people per line to fill the bags, weigh them and seal.  We will be running 4 lines for probably 3 hours. We wondered if perhaps the Scouts might be interested in helping to set up, tear down or fill the bags. Set up will be on Friday, October 24 around 6:00.  Saturday, October 25 they will be filling the bags of rice in two different shifts, 10 – noon and 1:00 – 3:00. They could use some help with cleanup and tear down around 3:00 on Saturday.

Please let me or Christy know if you would be interested in helping with this service project at the church! You can also contact the person below who is our contact on the mission’s team at the church and let her know you are interested in helping. She can keep you updated on times for the Saturday part of the project!

Philmont 2027 – Our troop has been slotted for a reservation entry for Philmont 2027. However, at this point I won’t know any information until the “reservation” period is over and that includes whether we will get a reservation spot or not. The reservation period closes on Oct. 16th and then after that there is a lottery to see what troops get reservations and what dates they get. However, I am confident we will get one. Philmont has seen a decline in the number of crews attending each summer and there are usually spots open at the end of the lottery. Once I know more information you will know more information! As of right now though, I have 33 of our possible 36 spots for Philmont 2027 filled up.

Tuesday, November 4 – no troop meeting due to election day at church. All church activities are cancelled, and the building is closed except for the election.

Scoutmaster Minute – This is Part 2 of my Scoutmaster Minute from last week. Last week I talked about how we often don’t truly learn skills unless we put them to use on a regular basis. We don’t often learn math unless we do math, we don’t often learn to play a musical instrument well, unless we practice, we don’t learn knots or lashings unless we do them! Scout skills are the same in every way. You never want to “do” First Aid, but you can practice it to sharpen your skills. You can practice just about anything to truly master something.

Well, right after I emailed out last week’s Trail Talk, I was having a talk with my trusted advisors in scouting, my daughters, and Rachel brought up a great point that I wish I had added last week. Not only is using skills one way to make sure you learn and master them, but another way is teaching those skills to others! Rachel said to me “dad, you know these things so well because you have been teaching them to others for forever” and you know what….she is absolutely correct! Now, not everybody is a natural born teacher…let’s be honest, you all have had that person or person who drove you nuts because maybe they weren’t the best at imparting information or because they were interminably boring. However, when you take a stab at it and try to teach a lot of things, you learn them better yourself.

I am often asked why I became a teacher, why did I choose education as my profession. One of the reasons I tell people is because of Scouting and more specifically because of the teaching I did in scouting AS A SCOUT! Between the time that I earned my Life Scout and then earned my Eagle, I spent those intervening years teaching scout skills. I taught T21 skills frequently or I would help teach a merit badge. Often people will ask me, “what took you so long to earn your Eagle after you got your Life” and I tell them that it is because I spent those scout years teaching others the skills I had been taught. I figured that someone had taken the time to teach me those skills and so I should give back by doing the same.

A story I tell people often has nothing to do with scouting but with this example of learning things better by teaching them.  In my 5th or 6th year as a teacher, I was teaching a Pre-Calculus class at one of the schools I worked at. I was writing something up on the board, I don’t even remember what anymore, but as I was writing out this problem on the board and going over it with the class, I had this epiphany. Right there in the middle of the problem I said to myself “That is WHY this works!”  I understand not only HOW to do it but WHY it works as well and that is because I was teaching it to others.

Don’t be afraid to try teaching skills to other people. You might just find out that you are both learning at the same time and that is OK!

“What Troop Does More!!” – 244