After more than two years of planning and fundraising, a group of 12 Girl Guides and three leaders from the Salmon Arm Pathfinders and Rangers are in England.
During their three-week trip the girls are sightseeing in London, staying at the Guiding Heritage centre and at Pax Lodge, one of the Guiding World Centres. They will be joined on this part of their journey by the English Girl Guides who stayed in Salmon Arm after the SOAR Provincial camp in Enderby last summer.
From London the group heads north to the Derbyshire countryside where they will be hosted by a new group of Girl Guides for the PEAK 2015 International camp and afterwards for homestay and exploring in the north of England.
After arriving in London at 8 a.m. with an eight-hour time difference and very little sleep, the girls had to negotiate public transport with all their gear.
It was all worth it. On reaching the UK Guiding Headquarters, their accommodation in London, they were greeted by the leaders and most of their Guiding friends from last summer in Enderby.
The highlights of this part of the trip were the London Eye, being able to go inside the gates and stand beside the walls of Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard, walking over the top section of Tower Bridge, which has a glass floor, seeing how many Girl Guides can fit in a red phone box (all 12 of them into two boxes), flat peaches found in the Borough food market and the architecture.
Having to say goodbye to their Anglia Guiding friends at Kings Cross Station (Platform 9 and three quarters), was the hardest thing but they were about to board a train (but not the Hogwarts Express), to New Mills in the county of Derbyshire to meet a new group of Guides who they would be camping with in a few days.